MEXICO CITY - Hour after hour, Mexicans were transfixed by dramatic efforts to reach a young girl thought buried in the rubble of a school destroyed by a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. She reportedly wiggled her fingers, told rescuers her name and said there were others trapped near her. Rescuers called for tubes, pipes and other tools to reach her.

News media, officials and volunteers all repeated the story of "Frida Sofia" with an urgency that drew attention away from other rescue efforts.

But she never existed, Mexican Navy officials now say.

"We want to emphasize that we have no knowledge about the report that emerged with the name of a girl," navy Assistant Secretary Angel Enrique Sarmiento said Thursday. "We never had any knowledge about that report, and we do not believe - we are sure - it was not a reality."

Sarmiento said a camera lowered into the rubble of the Enrique Rebsamen school showed blood tracks where an injured person apparently dragged himself or herself. But there were no fingers wiggling, no voice, no name. Several dead have been removed from the rubble, and it could have been their fingers rescuers thought they saw move.

Sarmiento later said that if a person is still trapped it could be a child or an adult.

"The information existing at this moment doesn't allow us to say if it is an adult or a child," Sarmiento said. "As long as there is the slightest possibility of someone alive, we will continue searching with the same energy."

Twitter users quickly brought out the "fake news" tag and complained that the widespread coverage had distracted attention from real rescue efforts where victims have been pulled alive from the rubble - something that hasn't happened at the school in at least a day.

Only one network had been permitted to enter the area. The military, which ran the rescue operation, spoke directly only to the network's reporters inside the site.

The Associated Press and others reported about the search for the girl, based on interviews with rescue workers leaving the scene who believed it was true.

"I don't think there was bad faith involved," security analyst Alejandro Hope said. "You want to believe there are children still alive down there."

Associated Press

(China Daily 09/23/2017 page1)