Dead worker recovered from beneath Seabank Hotel rubble

Adds comments by Seabank's CEO and project manager at 1:40pm

After almost 20 hours of intensive searches, Civil Protection personnel have recovered the lifeless body of a 27 year-old Latvian worker beneath tonnes of concrete debris which buried him alive when two floors of a construction site at Seabank Hotel in Ghadira Bay collapsed.

The body was recovered at 05:30am under heavy rainfall, which added further risks to the rescuers.

Another person managed to make it out of the debris when the incident happened yesterday at 10:30am. 

The hotel's CEO Arthur Gauci and the hotel's project manager, Emvin Bartolo said that two foreign workers were dismantling a scaffolding structure when the roof of the car park collapsed at around 10:45am. One man is still missing whilst another man managed to get out of the ruins and one ambulance was seen leaving the place.

Apparently a structure above the car park collapsed and the two men who were in the underground car park with 250 parking spaces where trapped. 

The Seabank Hotel is undergoing major extension works and according to the company providing consultancy on Health and Safety for the construction works, the hotel was sheduled to re-open in this month, in time for the 2012 summer season.

The rescue operation is proceeding at a very slow pace as the underground car park roof is most likely to have collapsed two storeys down.  Rescuers are facing a difficult task because the state of the structure poses the risk of further collapse.  

Richard Aquilina, the expert appointed by court arrived on site at 1pm whilst the duty magistrate descended on the site just before 4pm.