Earthquake: ‘Life finished here’: A village vanishes… bodies & rubble left

It was delicate work for the searchers to remove the woman’s body from the rubble of a village that effectively ceased to exist in Morocco‘s deadliest earthquake in over six decades. Her fiance Omar Ait Mbarek watched the digging with his eyes full of tears, just kilometres from the epicentre in the Atlas Mountains. He was on the phone with her when the shaking started late Friday. Mina Ait Bihi was carried away to a makeshift cemetery that already held 68 others. All around him the village of Tikht, previously home to at least 100 families, was a tangle of timbers and chunks of masonry. “Life is finished here, said Mohssin Aksum, 33, who had family living in the tiny settlement. “The village is dead.”