Quake strikes Italy Halloween revellers

But they said they did not hold out any hope of finding alive six people still believed to be trapped under the primary school building.

They had managed to pull out two children alive in the small hours of the morning, including one called Angelo whom the rescue workers had been trying to reach for hours after he was discovered with his feet pinned under a concrete slab, police said.

Most of the victims were primary school children aged seven or eight. The quake, measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale, also claimed the lives of two women, aged 56 and 90, whose homes in the same town were also hit.