Rescuers dig for trapped survivors as Iceland cave collapse kills tourist

Rescue services attempting to reach two people after incident at Breidamerkurjokull glacier

One person has died and two others were left trapped after an ice cave collapsed in Iceland while a tour group was visiting a remote glacier.
The tourists were buried under slabs of ice after the wall at the entrance to the cave, on the Breidamerkurjokull glacier in the south-east of the country, collapsed on Sunday afternoon.
Two seriously wounded people were rescued from under the ice. Police later confirmed that one had died, while the other had been flown to Reykjavik, the capital, and remained in a critical condition.
The tourists do not appear to be trapped inside the cave but in a shallow ravine next to two cave entrances. Volunteers were working with chainsaws and spades on Monday to cut through the ice as they attempted to reach the remaining two.
“We have three teams that take turns, working for an hour at a time scooping and breaking down ice,” police chief Sveinn Runar Kristjansson told the media on Monday. “Meanwhile, we are still figuring out who might be down there under the ice.”
The tourists were members of a 25-person group of several nationalities. It is not clear what country the trapped tourists come from, with local authorities saying they would keep the information confidential until their families had been informed. 
The UK foreign office has said British nationals are not among those trapped.
Drone footage shot on Monday showed several dozen rescue workers at the scene, some with spades attempting to dig through huge slabs of ice that collapsed into the muddy ice ravine.
Police have described the conditions as “very difficult”, with rescue services unable to get heavy machinery up onto the glacier and most of the work was being done by hand. The operation was paused overnight, resuming in the early hours of Monday.
A tourist who was at the scene in the afternoon before the cave wall collapsed described hearing a crash on his way back down from the glacier.
He told a local news station that his group thought nothing of it until they returned to their hotel and heard the news. The man, who did not want to be named, said that the cave was three to five metres deep at most.
Breidamerkurjokull is a tongue of ice that stretches down to the coast from the main glacier in the Vatnajokull National Park. One of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions, it is famous for the constantly-changing caves cut through it by rainfall and rivers in the summer.
The change and movement in the ice makes it highly unstable, local mountain guides have warned. In recent months, they have raised questions about safety on the glacier, which tour groups can visit all year round.
The Association of Mountain Guides in Iceland called for an investigation, saying there needed to be stricter rules for when such tours can take place.
In June, Iris Ragnarsdottir Pedersen, a mountain guide, told local broadcaster RUV  some tour companies were breaking the law by drilling man-made entrances to the caves. She said it was only responsible to carry out tours between December and March.