'Help, we are dying': Texts from inside avalanche-hit hotel in Italy

People trapped in an Italian hotel hit by an avalanche sent text messages to the emergency services and loved ones pleading for help, according to local reports.

Phone lines were cut to the Hotel Rigopiano when it was buried by snow following a series of earthquakes in the central Abruzzo region.

"Help, help, we are dying of the cold," someone stuck in the hotel wrote, La Repubblica reported.

Footage showed relatives exchanging phone messages with someone trapped inside. One text sent urged them to "be calm".

"They are extracting them from the hotel, and bringing them to hospitals, I think. But I don't know because it is impossible for us to go up. I am sorry," read another message.

Rescuers, who had to ski to the hotel in the town of Farindola on the Gran Sasso mountain, said: "We call but no one answers."

They said the "avalanche is immense" and described the scene as "apocalyptic".

A restaurant owner, Quintino Marcella, said he received a phone call on Wednesday evening from one of his staff who was staying at the hotel but was outside when the avalanche hit.

"He calls me and says 'Help me, an avalanche has hit and the hotel isn't there anymore. It's disappeared. It's buried. Two of us are here but call rescue crews.'"

Mr Marcella said when he called the prefecture's emergency coordination centre they assured him that the hotel had phoned two or three hours earlier reporting everything was fine.

He told Sky TG24 that no one took him seriously until after 8pm.

Corriere della Sera quoted a guest who had managed to get out as saying: "Some walls were knocked down.

"I'm outside with a maintenance worker but you can't see anything of the hotel, there's only a wall of snow in front of me."