French hiker's body found, row over rescue effort

(ANSA) - Salerno, August 19 - The body of a French hiker was found in a gully near Salerno Sunday nine days after he called emergency services saying he had fallen and broken his legs.
    The body of Simon Gautier, 27, was found at Belvedere di Ciolandrea near San Giovanni a Piro.
    He made the emergency call after his fall on August 9.
    But search and rescue operations only started 28 hours later.
    Friends and family who came from France to take part in the rescue bid have criticised alleged delays.
    "Mistakes were made from the start," they said.
    Gautier fell in a remote area of the rocky coast near Salerno where it is hard to locate cellphone signals, sources said.
    The president of the Italian 118 emergency response system company, Mario Balzanelli, said Gautier would have been immediately geolocated, "very swiftly" rescued and his life probably saved if Italy had applied a 2009 EU directive on the geolocation of emergency calls. "This case points to the glaring, absurd and untenable fact that in Italy the 118 switchboards are still without the emergency call geolocation system, although this is envisaged by an industry minister decree in 2009," he said.