Man pulled from Iran quake rubble slips into coma

A 56-year-old man was rescued alive after spending 13 days beneath the rubble of the earthquake-razed Iranian city of Bam, but he then slipped into a coma and doctors said on Thursday they feared for his life.
Rescue workers found the man on Wednesday afternoon trapped beneath a wardrobe, which had apparently saved his life.
Rescue workers were prompted to look for the man after a woman living nearby noticed his body had not yet been recovered.
"It seems he had some water because around him was wet," said medic Mehdi Shadnoush, part of a Ukrainian-Iranian team treating the man at a field hospital in Bam.
"When he arrived at the hospital his signs of life were very weak. He was frozen and now he is in a coma," Shadnoush told Reuters.
The man lay on a hospital bed covered by a white blanket and had an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. He looked very thin and had a white-and-black beard.
"We are following his status minute by minute but we don't hold out too much hope," Shadnoush said.
State radio had originally reported the man's age as 57. But doctors said that when he was first brought to the hospital he had been able to give his first name, Jalil, and his age, 56. He slipped into a coma overnight.
He was the first survivor to emerge alive from the ruins of the ancient Silk Road City 1,000km (625 miles) south-east of Tehran since a woman in her 90s was rescued on January 3.
The December 26 earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, struck just before dawn, destroying 90 percent of the city's buildings and killing more than 30,000 people.
Experts say it is very rare for people to survive for more than 72 hours in such conditions. Temperatures have fallen to around freezing most nights since the earthquake struck.
Tremors continued to shake another region of Iran for a third day on Thursday, causing damage to buildings but no casualties, the official IRNA news agency reported.
The small earthquakes, measuring 3.4 and 4.2 on the Richter scale were the latest of more than 30 tremors to rattle the south-western province of Khuzestan. There were no reports of any damage to its many oil installations.
Aid workers said the man rescued on Wednesday afternoon had travelled from a nearby village to Bam for medical treatment and was staying with his sister when the earthquake struck.
"We have sent people to his village to bring his wife to the hospital," said Iranian aid worker Mohammad Reza Tahmasbi.