ROME, Dec 22 — An emergency team said Wednesday they had rescued an injured Italian caver trapped underground for four days — the second time the woman has had to be carried out of the same cave.

Ottavia Piana, 32, was lifted out of the cave in northern Italy in the early hours of the morning, the Alpine rescue service said earlier this week. She had suffered several fractures after falling there last Saturday.

In all, 159 rescuers "from 13 Italian regions” were mobilised to help pull Piana from the cave, said the rescue team.

Six doctors and eight nurses were amongst the rescuers. Among them was Leonardo Sattin, a doctor who was part of the rescue team that had pulled Piana from the same cave a year and half earlier when she broke her leg.

"Doctor, we know each other,” Piana told Sattin, according to a report in the Corriere della Serra daily.

Rescuers needed four days to extract Piana from the cave because the crevice she had fallen into was too tight for the stretcher. They had to use micro-explosives to widen the bottlenecks enough to get her out.

"At 2.59am the rescuers reached the exit” of the cave, carrying Piana out on a stretcher, they added. From there, she was flown by helicopter to a hospital in the northern town of Bergamo.

One rescuer told the daily that they had shown Piana "messages from her friends” to keep up her spirits during the ordeal. — AFP