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A wedding celebration saved all the people of a Moroccan village during Friday’s deadly earthquake, which destroyed their stone and mud-brick houses.
They were saved because the earthquake happened while they were enjoying traditional music in an outdoor courtyard.
The marriage of Habiba Ajdir, 22, and apple farmer Mohammed Boudad, 30, was due to take place at his village of Kettou on Saturday, but by custom, the bride’s family held a party the night before the wedding.
Morocco experienced a deadly earthquake on September 8. This triggered rock slides, blocking roads and making it hard for rescue teams to reach the large affected mountainous areas.
The Friday night quake has left 2,862 people dead and 2,562 others injured, according to the latest update from Morocco’s Interior Ministry.
According to the United Nations (UN) humanitarian hub, Reliefweb, the powerful quake struck the country shortly after 10 p.m. local time on Friday.
It measures 6.8 on the Richter scale at a depth of 18.5 km, with the epicentre located in the High Atlas mountains, some 71 km southwest of the historic city of Marrakech.
According to media reports, several houses in the city of 840,000 collapsed and other buildings suffered structural damage. The epicentral zone is not densely populated.
Similarly, a Mediterranean storm made landfall in eastern Libya on Sunday, triggering floods and destroying facilities along its path, leaving more than 2,300 people dead and 5,000 others missing.
More than 30,000 lost their homes
The disastrous flooding in Libya left more than 30,000 people homeless, according to the International Organistion for Migration (IOM) on Wednesday.
The figures referred to the particularly hard-hit port city of Derna alone, the UN organisation said.
Thousands more have lost their homes in cities in the east of the country after two dams broke in eastern Libya near Derna, sweeping entire neighbourhoods into the sea.
Some 10,000 people were missing, and according to the administration in the east of the country, more than 5,000 people have died.
The IOM has estimated that at least 2,000 persons were killed and over 5,000 are missing.
Two rival governments were vying for power in Libya, which has been plagued by unrest in recent years.
One was based in the east and the other in the capital Tripoli, in the west.