SYRACUSE, Sicily -- A strong earthquake hit eastern Sicily Thursday, killing at least 15 people, injuring more than 200 and leaving as many as 2,000 people homeless, rescue officials said.
The main shock, registering 4.7 on the Richter scale, rocked sleeping cities on or near the eastern shore of the island at 1:24 a.m. It lasted 45 seconds and was followed by four lesser tremors, the National Geophysics Institute said.
It damaged public buildings and private homes in cities and towns from Syracuse to Augusta and inland to Ragusa, but only a few houses collapsed.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes to spend the night in their cars or in open country in pouring rain and freezing temperatures. Hospitals reported that most of the more than 200 injured suffered severe shock or broken bones while fleeing their homes.
By late Thursday rescue officials said 11 people died under the wreckage of three two-story buildings that collapsed in Carlentini, a citrus-farming community of 12,000 inhabitants, a few miles inland between Siracusa and Catania.
They were the only people killed directly by the quake. The other four casualties were elderly people who died in scattered cities as a result of heart attacks brought on by shock, police said.
In Carlentini, hundreds of firemen and volunteers scrabbled in the rain to dig out the dead and rescue the injured.
In one of the collapsed houses they found the bodies of Sebastiano Musemeci, 30, his wife Francesca and their 18-month-old daughter, Veronica.
'They were all in each other's arms in a big bed,' a fire service rescuer who found them said. 'Maybe they were all so soundly asleep that they never knew what was happening -- at least we hope that is how it was.'
Rosario Musemeci, the couple's 5-year-old son, was rescued alive with head injuries.
In another of the collapsed houses, sisters Loredana and Antonella Cardillo and their sons, aged 4 and 18 months, were found dead in the wreckage.
A whole district of Carlentini had to be evacuated because its run- down houses were unsafe. City officials said 300 families -- a total of around 1,000 people were rendered homeless in Carlentini alone. Army troops were bulding a tent city to shelter them until their homes could be checked by experts.
Another 300 families, around 600 people, had to evacuate in Augusta and were being sheltered temporarily in vacation camps and hotels.
In Augusta the quake dislodged 12 coffins from their niches in the cemetery walls and damaged a church.
Mayor Carmelo Tringali asked the Augusta naval base to provide sailors to protect the abandoned homes against looting. Carlentini police arrested two men found in evacuated homes and accused them of theft.
The quake was the most severe to hit Italy or Sicily since November 1980 when a quake registering 6.8 on the Richter scale devastated a mountain region southeast of Naples, killing 2,570 people and making nearly 200,000 homeless.
The east coast of Sicily is prone to earthquakes caused by friction between the tectonic shelves of Africa and Europe-Asia. In 1908, 78,000 people were killed in an earthquake in Messina.
