President John Dramani Mahama has accepted an offer from Israel to help locate and extract any remaining survivors in the collapsed Melcom shopping mall disaster that took place on Wednesday.
The Israeli Ambassador to Ghana, Bar-li made this offer.
An Israeli plane, with an equipped 18-man team of disaster management experts and doctors to assist with efforts to rescue the trapped under the rubble building, will arrive at the Kotoka International Airport shortly.
With nearly 30 years of experience, the Israeli Rescue teams have saved lives in countries such as Turkey, Greece, Chile, Kenya , India, Thailand, Haiti and most recently Japan.
A statement signed by the President’s Spokesperson, John Abdulai Jinapor, said the Israeli team will be working in close collaboration with the detachment from the Field Engineers Regiment of the Ghana Army currently at the site.
The hard work of the Field Engineers, NADMO and other emergency institutions including the Ghana Police and the National Ambulance Service have led to the rescue of at least seventy-one persons (as at 8:05am Thursday) from the rubble.
Mr. Jinapor said the team will make an initial assessment of the site using special equipment and sniffer dogs that will help identify the locations of possible survivors or corpses.
An additional team of about one hundred and fifty (150) with additional equipment including field hospitals, concrete cutters among others are on standby to move to Ghana should the initial assessment deems it necessary.