Survivors return with tales of horror, escape

Foreigners who survived the devastating earthquake in Haiti have started trickling back to their homelands with tales of horror and narrow escape, and filled with sadness for those who perished.

A first group of 13 Italian survivors arrived in Rome yesterday, local media reported, among them an 87-year-old man who lived in the impoverished Caribbean nation for 60 years, a pregnant woman, and four families with three children.

"Everything is destroyed, our house is damaged and who knows if we will be able to live there again ...I had a clothes shop but now everything is destroyed," said octogenarian Francesco Nocera, originally from Naples.

UN volunteer Matteo Menin told the Ansa news agency he was among the 60 who escaped the collapse of the Hotel Christopher where the UN mission was housed.

"There were Italians working from the third floor to the upper storeys and it's possible that some of them are still in the rubble," he said, adding that he was lucky "because my office had an exit onto the courtyard. As soon as I felt the tremor, I got out."

In The Netherlands, six Dutch citizens and their six adoptive Haitian children arrived by military transport plane in the southern town of Eindhoven yesterday after being evacuated from Haiti via Curacao, the Dutch foreign ministry said.

Three more Dutch nationals and one adoptive Haitian child, who was seriously injured in the quake, remain in the Venezuelan capital, the ministry added.

Quake survivors stepped on home soil grateful to be alive but many with horrific memories of the chaos and carnage caused by Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude quake.

"I slept among corpses, I walked on blood," said Michele Marie, who was among the first wave of 150 French nationals to return home to Paris on Friday.

"People were crushed... Even if you find members of your family, you don't know, because they are so badly disfigured," said Ms Marie, who was on holiday in Haiti when the worst quake in more than a century hit.

"I thank God because I'm still alive," said Jerome Wilfried, sobbing, "but I'm crying for all those who were left behind because it's really hard."

The Haitian government has estimated that as many as 100,000 people were killed in the quake.

The number of foreigners who died is as yet unknown with scattered reports coming in from various countries.

Italy says it has confirmed the death of one of its citizens while France says at least 12 French nationals were killed in the Haiti disaster and Syria reports two deaths.

Both Canada and China each report eight of their countrymen killed in the quake.

Many of the foreigners who died in Haiti were working with the UN mission to the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

The UN mission chief in Haiti, former Tunisian diplomat Hedi Annabi, and his Brazilian deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa and the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, were among the casualties of what UN chief Ban Ki-moon called the "most serious humanitarian crisis" to face the world body in decades.

Three Jordanian police officers working with the UN perished in the quake along with 15 Brazilian peacekeepers, a UN worker from Chad and another from Argentina.

"I'm confused but happy to be alive," said UN worker Cristina Lampieri after touching down in Rome yesterday.

The earthquake "was an awful thing, in a minute, everything changed and the tremors continued, we thought we were on a floating platform" in our home.

"The apartment is still standing but it's no longer habitable and the office has been destroyed," she said.