For 48 frantic hours his parents had searched for their two-year-old son, digging with their bare hands among the twisted rubble of their collapsed home.

They could hear his increasingly weak cries but simply could not shift the mangled concrete and metal that had trapped him somewhere below.

Yesterday, however, came the joyous moment they had feared they would never see after the massive earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday, killing up to 50,000.

That moment of joy: Redjeson's face breaks into a smile as his mother Daphnee reaches out for him

Redjeson Hausteen: The rescuer takes little Redjeson to his mother

 

Hope: This three-month-old child was found alive

Rescue workers, burrowing deep into the rubble, head torches picking out their route, edged their way successfully towards little Redjeson Claude.

He was then passed along a human chain, his head scarred by dried blood and his face covered in minor wounds.

He looked bewildered - until the moment he saw his mother Daphnee. Then, his eyes lit up and his face creased into a smile as she reached forward to cuddle him.

For the international rescue teams operating in the heart of the broken Haiti capital Port-au-Prince, it was a moment of relief and achievement as they worked, often in wreckage containing bodies, in a race against time to find those still alive.

At least 55 people had been rescued alive in the city by nightfall but aid agencies said that voices, including those of children, could still be heard calling from the debris.

In one school, rescuers found two girls and a boy alive, while in a crumpled tower block they discovered a 60-year-old man, who had been in his fifth floor apartment when the earthquake, measuring seven on the Richter scale, hit.

At the city's Hotel Montana, Spanish rescue teams pulled 65-year-old Sarlah Chand, a doctor, alive from the debris where she had been buried for more than 50 hours, fearing she would die where she lay. Remarkably, she had no broken bones.