(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-05-16 06:38

HANWANG, Mianzhu - Doctors amputated a teenage girl's crushed legs yesterday, the only way they could pull her alive from the wreckage of her school three days after an earthquake flattened swathes of Sichuan province.

A rescuer carries high-school student Yang Liu (C), wearing a helmet, from the rubble after doctors amputated her legs to free her at a collapsed school in the township of Hanwang, in Mianzhu city north of Chengdu, Sichuan Province May 15, 2008. China poured more troops into the earthquake-ravaged province of Sichuan to speed up the search for survivors as time ran out for thousands of people buried under rubble and mud. [Agencies]

Yang Liu was trapped in what appeared to be a doorway by Monday's quake, near the top of a massive pile of bricks and concrete.

Her position likely saved her life.

Moments after the hasty, on-site surgery took place, doctors carried her down the hill of rubble, before speeding off in a waiting ambulance to hospital in the nearby city of Deyang.

"We saved her," said one of the doctors involved, walking away from the site still wearing a face mask and with a stethoscope around his neck. "Her condition is still quite precarious."

On Wednesday, rescuers had led a photojournalist to the school to take pictures of Yang for surgeons to study in preparation.

As doctors did their work, cranes clearing the site halted and the crowd at the school ground, many of them relatives of the victim, fell silent.

Another doctor, surnamed Wang, said the whole operation took less than 20 minutes.

"It didn't take long at all, they just needed to cut through the bones," he said.