The body of a 28-year-old Greek student, Vassilis Koufolias, was pulled from the rubble of his apartment in L’Aquila, the central Italian town razed by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck on Monday, killing more than 200 people.

Workers located Vassilis Koufolias on Monday along with his 24-year-old sister Dionysia Koufolia and fellow student, George Constantopoulos, who had been in the apartment when the quake struck.

His sister and the other student were rescued from the rubble with minor injuries. However, the  28-year-old student died before rescuers were able to dig him out from the rubble.

Koufolias’s mother and girlfriend went to L’Aquila where they shouted words of support for hours as rescue workers struggled to reach the 28-year-old.

At 4 a.m. yesterday, the workers got to him but he was already dead.

Dionysia Koufolia and George Constantopoulos, were transferred from L’ Aquila’s San Salvatore hospital to a hospital in Pescara, along with a third woman called Giagiou, who was being treated at San Salvatore Hospital for a broken arm.

Hundreds of Greek students based in the medieval town were flown home on an Olympic Airlines flight from Rome yesterday and hundreds more boarded on to ferries to Patras from Bari.

The honourary consul for Greece in Ancona had gone to Pescara to visit the two students in hospital there, while a Greek team sent by the Italian Embassy and consular authorities had managed to reach L’Aquila.

The consular officials gathered the Greek students that wished to return to Greece and provided them with necessary travel documents and other basic goods, and arranged for their transportation by bus to Rome Airport, where two Greek airlines have offered to provide free flights to return them to their homes.