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SAN GIULIANO DI PUGLIA, Italy, Sunday (Reuters)

Fresh tremors shook south-central Italy early on Saturday and police kept residents away from the small farming town where an earthquake flattened a school, killing 26 children.

Tremors measuring 3.7 and 3.8 on the Richter scale shook buildings in the area round San Giuliano di Puglia, where the quake destroyed the Francesco Iovine primary school on Thursday, the Prime Minister's Office said.

Local police official Giuseppe Carrarelli said a criminal inquiry had been opened into why the school building collapsed in seconds, crushing children and teachers at a Halloween party, but gave no details.

Some 850 anguished residents of the town spent a cold and wretched night in a hillside tent camp two kilometres (miles) from their homes, after authorities said the buildings, cracked and shaken by the quake and several aftershocks, were unsafe.

Camp dwellers sobbed over the devastation to their lives, the loss of their children and the forced abandonment of their homes, two thirds of which suffered quake damage.

"This was a town in which everything was fine: there was work, there were lots of children. Everyone had everything. Now no one has anything left," said Rosanna Pilla, 35, after a chilly night in the sparsely furnished encampment.

Aerial shots of the medieval town showed that many buildings in the centre, some of them hundreds of years old, were damaged. Only the school collapsed like a house of cards, reduced to a heap of concrete in a few seconds.

Some 60 children were in the school when the quake struck, killing a whole class of six-year-olds and one teacher. But rescue workers clawing through the rubble for 36 hours with their bare hands managed to pull 35 people out alive.

Building regulations were looser in the 1950s, when the school was built, although the region was prone to earthquakes.

Some experts said the school's walls were not strong enough to carry the weight of the heavy concrete in the roof and in the walls of new classrooms added onto the second storey.

Anger mounted across the country over the disaster. Two elderly women were crushed to death elsewhere in the town of 1,200, and at least 3,000 people in the southern Molise region were made homeless by the main earthquake and a further strong tremor on Friday.

"It's normal to open an inquiry when you have this type of incident, even if eventually it is established that there is no wrongdoing," Carrarelli told Reuters.

The daily paper Corriere della Sera reported that the national earthquake service had drawn up a report in 1998 reclassifying quake risks and saying the area around San Giuliano di Puglia was threatened, but that no measures had been taken as a result.

As police sealed off roads into the town, one family squeezed their possessions into their old Fiat 500 car and prepared to leave and stay with relatives.

"The whole town was in the camp," said Raffaele, in his fifties. "It was really cold. All the clothes we had were not enough to keep us warm."

One policeman said he did not expect residents to be allowed home until at least Sunday as firefighters inspected damage to buildings amid fears of further aftershocks.

"I just want to go home and get some warm clothes," said Orazio Bollella, 65. "I've also got dogs and chickens to feed."

Some rescue workers dealing with this week's eruption of Mount Etna on Sicily were rushed to the earthquake area, an Interior Ministry official said.

The first quake, registering 5.4 on the Richter scale, was the biggest to hit Italy since 1997. It was followed by a series of aftershocks and another major tremor, 5.3 on the Richter scale, on Friday afternoon.

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