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Cat emerges two weeks after landslide tragedy

Monday, August 03, 2009 BERLIN: Two weeks after tragedy struck, a spark of good news has emerged from the Nachterstedt landslide: a cat belonging to the couple killed in the accident has survived, Bild newspaper reported on Friday.Incredibly, the dead couple’s neighbours, who lost their home but survived because they were out of town at the time, came across the bedraggled Angora cat called “Miezi” while driving through town.“Suddenly Miezi was on the street,” neighbour Elke Schirrmeister, 59, told the paper. “I thought I wasn’t seeing right.”The couple drove on, but the next day, Miezi was sitting in front of the Schirrmeisters‘ motor home, which they are using as temporary accommodation.Their house was one of the two destroyed on July 18 when a piece of ground the size of six football pitches tore free and slid into Concordia Lake, a former open-pit mine filled with water on the edge of Nachterstedt in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.Their neighbours Ilka, 48, and Peter K., 51, were killed in the accident along with one other person.The healthy but ravenous Miezi wolfed down a whole box of cat food after he turned up, Schirrmeister said.“She was completely trusting,” she said. “Who knows what the poor animal had been through.”The couple has adopted the cat.

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