Sawt Falasteen - Clearing bomb wreckage, Venezuelan mourns aunt killed in US raid

A jagged hole gaped in the apartment wall, through which Gonzalez said he pulled his aunt after the blast early Saturday in the port city of La Guaira.

A projectile hit the apartment building during airstrikes that led to the capture of leftist leader Nicolas Maduro by US forces in the nearby capital Caracas.

Rosa Gonzalez, a lawyer who had lived with her nephew Wilman, a retiree of 62, suffered a trauma to the chest that left her struggling to breathe and with pain in her arm.

"She didn't die here, she died at the hospital," said Wilman, still in shock, his right eye bruised and stitched.

He said he was looking at his cell phone when the blast hurled him through the air.

"It was so immense," he told AFP, that "the front door flew off, the wooden door flew off, and slammed me against the wall."

Rosa was asleep in another room.

"We took her to the little hospital and they gave her oxygen. But she couldn't bear the pain" and died, he said.

- Mourners at coffin -

Police initially took Rosa's body away for an autopsy. Then on Monday, family and friends came to mourn in silence in a small chapel, where her wooden coffin lay half-open.

"She was a very simple, very kind woman, with lots of friends," said her brother Jose Luis Gonzalez, 82, the only one still alive of five siblings.

"A tragedy like this should never have happened in Venezuela, in such a quiet town."

The faded blue facade of Wilman Gonzalez's public housing block, named simply Building 12, was devastated by the projectile.

Doors and walls lay demolished, shattered glass everywhere.

Neighbors picked up small metal fragments of the projectile from Wilman's living room. Authorities took away the larger pieces.

After the blast, "I thought I was dead," Wilman recalled. "God, forgive my sins."

He complained of having received scant help from the government.

Wilman wandered among the remnants of his home, picking up pieces of wood, staring at them and throwing them back down.

With a screwdriver in hand, he checked if a closet could be salvaged -- but everything was useless.

Neighbors recovered pots, blenders, documents and window frames.

"I've seen this on TV. Palestine, Iraq, all those people. Not here," he said.

- Tears and trauma -

The impact damaged eight of the 16 apartments in the building.

In the apartment of his 80-year-old mother Tibisay, Cesar Diaz gathered documents and stuffed them into a dirty woven bag.

A neighbor, 48-year-old firefighter Jesus Linares, recounted how he saved Tibisay in the chaos.

He showed the faded sheet he used to stop her head bleeding before rushing her to the hospital.

"These were her little shoes," he said incredulously, pointing to a lone plastic sandal.

Diaz, 59, was sweating and still in shock as he spoke to AFP.

"Wow! What a huge thing to happen right here, in my mother's house," he said.

"It will traumatize her... It's hard to come here and not see her sitting in her chair," he added, on the verge of tears.

With what little composure he had left in the aftermath of the bombing, Linares helped Tibisay and got his own 85-year-old mother and 16-year-old daughter out too.

"I tried to focus as if it were an earthquake: stay calm and focus on their lives and help them."

Three decades of service as a firefighter prepared Linares to "save lives," he said.

"This time, what I had to do was rescue myself and my family."

Police took away the projectile, but authorities have yet to provide help, the building residents said.

O.Salim--SF-PST