Sombre China mourns earthquake victims

|PIC1|Flags flew at half mast across China and the Olympic torch relay was suspended as the country began three days of mourning on Monday for more than 30,000 victims of an earthquake that struck a week ago.

But the search for survivors went on in the stricken southwestern province of Sichuan as families refused to give up hope for their loved ones, and rescuers found two more people alive in the rubble.

Around the vast country of 1.3 billion people, air raid sirens and car, train and ship horns will sound to "wail in grief" at 2.28 p.m. (7.28 a.m. British time), the time the quake hit a week ago, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The national flag in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing flew at half mast after a ceremony at dawn.

"I have come today with a heavy heart," said Liu Xianzeng, watching the ceremony in Tiananmen Square. "I feel for the victims of the earthquake and soldiers who are helping there."

Public entertainment was halted and a three-minute silence was also to be observed to mark exactly a week since the quake, the government said.

The Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges and the futures exchanges in Shanghai, Zhengzhou and Dalian would halt trading for three minutes from 2.28 p.m.

In Beichuan, one of the worst hit towns in Sichuan, relatives continued to travel back into the disaster zone to look for family members and see the damage for themselves.

"It's a good idea but maybe it's a bit early,' said Zhou Wanli of the national state of mourning, sitting in the back of a truck heading into Beichuan.

"All we can care about for the time being is finding our relatives. We don't want to memorialise them if we don't even know if they're alive or dead," he said.

SURVIVORS RESCUED

The official death toll from the 7.9 magnitude quake stands at nearly 32,500.

Some 220,000 people are reported injured and a further 9,500 are thought to be still buried under the rubble in Sichuan. Most are feared dead, but some are still being pulled out alive.

Statistics from past earthquakes show victims have survived up to nearly a fortnight under rubble.

There was a burst of elation in ruined Beichuan, when one woman was found alive.

Wang Hongguo, head of the rescue team, said she had found her under a mass of concrete. "We had to pull her out very gradually. She looked quite sturdy, so she might pull through," Wang said.

Rescuers also found a 50-year-old woman alive in the wreckage of a residential building at the Tianchi Coal Mine.

But seven days after the quake, rescuers mostly had the gruesome job of recovering decomposing bodies. Dozens of bodies were pulled from the rubble in Beichuan on Monday, and rescuers scattered lime and splashed disinfectant to prevent disease.

Even with hundreds of troops poring over the wreckage, some using specialised equipment and sniffer dogs, others carried on the search themselves.

Farmer Wang Hongchen and his wife Chen Guangfen scrambled over hundreds of metres of rubble to look for their son, who worked as a mobile phone repair man in the town.

"I think there's still hope. He worked on the first floor, so if he was lucky there would have been space for him to survive," Wang said, in between shouting out his son's name over the ruins.

"There's nothing I want more than to find him alive," added Chen. "Other people who know their relatives have died can call this a memorial day, or a funeral, but not me yet."

Officials have tried to keep people from the area because of aftershocks and a build-up of water in blocked rivers. Xinhua said the most dangerous mass of water was only about 3 km (2 miles) upstream from Beichuan.

Rescuers had yet to reach all the stricken villages, Xinhua reported. By late Sunday, 77 villages were still cut off.

China says it expects the final death toll to exceed 50,000.

Huge tent cities have sprung up in Sichuan to accommodate about 4.8 million people who lost their homes. A Foreign Ministry spokesman appealed to the international community to provide more tents, Xinhua reported.

Donations from home and abroad have topped 6 billion yuan (440 million pounds).