The death toll from the collapse of a school in Haiti rose to at least 75 today as rescue workers continued to search for survivors.
Around 500 people were believed to be inside the three-storey La Promesse college in Petionville, on the outskirts of the Haitian capital, Port au Prince, when it collapsed yesterday morning.
Rescue workers uncovered a room with 17 dead, many of them children, officials said. News of the grim discovery was relayed to the president Réne Préval, who was visiting the scene at the time.
"It really breaks your heart to see those children under the debris without being able to help them," he said.
Préval said searchers had dropped water and biscuits through holes in the rubble to one group of children.
"Last night we were sure there were still seven children alive. We got one of them but we have lost all signs of the other six being alive," he said. "Some say they might be sleeping. Others believe they have died."
At least 124 people were injured. The rescue effort by Red Cross staff, UN peacekeepers and Haitian authorities was hampered by people who blocked the steep, narrow street trying to enter the collapsed building in search of their loved ones.
Some rescue workers had to be airlifted in by helicopter, and they were unable to transport heavy equipment through the crowds - leaving them to work only with their hands. They maintained the search through the night under floodlights.
A rescue worker said the dead included an entire class with the exception of one girl who was alive because she had asked for permission to leave to use the toilet just before the collapse.
The school taught children from kindergarten through to high school. Several nearby houses were also damaged by the collapse.
One person who was trapped after debris pinned his legs down begged rescuers to "please cut my feet off", a firefighter told Reuters.
A woman screamed for her missing 12-year-old daughter. "I don't know if she is dead or alive," she said.
The concrete building's third storey was still under construction, and the Petionville mayor, Claire Lydie Parent, said she suspected a structural defect had caused the collapse, not the recent chain of tropical storms that caused devastation across Haiti.
The police commissioner, Francene Moreau, said the minister who ran the church-operated school could face criminal charges.
Neighbours suspected the building was poorly rebuilt after it partially collapsed eight years ago, said Jimmy Germain, a French teacher at the school. He said people who lived downhill from the site had abandoned their land out of fear the building would tumble on to them.
The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and its health minister, Bautista Rojas, said it was sending two helicopters to help. The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, promised to send a rescue team as soon as possible.
Rescue workers from the French Caribbean island of Martinique were already at the scene and a US team was expected shortly.
Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, has been struggling to recover from widespread riots over rising food prices, and a string of hurricanes and tropical storms that killed nearly 800 people. More than 9,000 UN peacekeepers were sent to the country after the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was driven out of in a bloody rebellion in 2004.