Mt. Etna, Italy, Europe‘s largest and most active volcano, spews ash and smoke in the Sicilian village of Nicolosi. The relation between Etna‘s eruption and the earthquake is being examined. PHOTO - REUTERS

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ROME – A violent earthquake toppled part of a nursery school in south-central Italy on Thursday, trapping some 50 children and injuring many of them, local media said. Regional officials told a television reporter that they could not rule out deaths at the school. The tremor, registering 5.4 on the Richter scale, hit at 11:40 a.m. near Campobasso, some 226 km southeast of Rome, the national geophysics institute said, making it the strongest quake to hit Italy since 1997. Part of the nursery school in the town of San Giuliano di Puglia collapsed during the earthquake, trapping children aged

three to six, agencies said. „There could even be deaths,“ the vice-president of the Molise region told ANSA. Five children were rescued.

All telephone lines to the region appeared to be down and the Interior Ministry‘s civil protection unit, which handles rescue operations, was unable to confirm the reports about the nursery school. Television images showed dozens of panicked residents running into the streets in Campobasso and parents from Naples to Bari in the southeastern region of Puglia rushing to pick up their children from schools. „I dropped everything to come find my children,“ one resident of Naples told a television reporter.

News agencies said more than a dozen people suffering from minor injuries or shock had checked into hospitals throughout the southern region. The tremor was the strongest since a quake registering 5.8 rocked nearby Umbria in 1997. Almost 2,800 people were killed in 1980 when a quake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale struck south of Naples. Thursday‘s quake was far from Sicily, where tremors five days ago jolted Mount Etna, Europe‘s largest and most active volcano, into life.

„We are transferring some of our workers from Etna to Campobasso to deal with the earthquake,“ a civil protection spokeswoman told Reuters. Reuters