Firefighters have conducted a preliminary search of Amatrice’s crumbled elementary school and financial police have begun gathering documentation about contracts for renovations of quake-destroyed public buildings as the investigation into the devastation kicked into higher gear a week after the temblor struck central Italy.
Another body was extracted from the rubble early Wednesday and a 23-year-old student who was injured in the hard-hit medieval town of Amatrice died at a hospital in Pescara, bringing the death toll from the Aug. 24 temblor to 294, with a handful of people still missing, the ANSA news agency reported.
A 3.8-magnitude aftershock hit the quake zone on Wednesday, reportedly damaging a building in Norcia. It was one of more than 3,000 post-quake aftershocks that have rattled residents, some 4,000 of whom remain homeless.