Frantic search for survivors

2005-10-09 22:49

Balakot - Villagers desperate to find earthquake survivors dug with bare hands on Sunday into collapsed homes and schools where children had been heard crying under the rubble.

Officials said nearly 20 000 bodies had been counted, but estimated the toll could exceed 30 000.

The vast majority of the deaths from Saturday's magnitude 7.7 quake were in Pakistan.

Neighbouring India reported several hundred and offered aid to its historic rival.

More than 30 000 people, many of them pupils, were estimated to have died in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir, said the region's communications minister, Tariq Mahmmod.

The worst-hit city was Pakistani Kashmir's capital, Muzaffarabad, where 11 000 died, Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao said.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf appealed to the United States, Britain and other countries to send heavy-lift cargo helicopters to bring aid to remote areas.

Authorities in India reported 600 deaths and more than 900 people injured, while Afghanistan reported at least four deaths.

The quake, centred in Pakistani Kashmir, flattened dozens of villages.

Schoolchildren

It killed farmers, homemakers, soldiers and schoolchildren, and triggered landslides that blocked rescuers from many areas where bodies lay in streets and villagers said they felt forsaken.

Many survivors were left without shelter in near-freezing nighttime temperatures.

In India's portion of Kashmir, villagers burned wood from their own collapsed homes for warmth.

Mahmmod said the army was providing help to survivors only in Kashmir's major cities and towns, and "they (troops) have not started relief work in remote villages where people are still buried in the rubble, and in some areas nobody is present to organise funerals for the dead."

The quake and its aftershocks were felt from central Afghanistan to western Bangladesh.

Survivors

Buildings were wrecked in an area spanning at least 400km from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to Srinagar in northern Indian territory.

Rescuers pulled two survivors - a boy and a woman - from a collapsed block of flats in Islamabad. They were listed in stable condition.

Pakistani military helicopters ferried troops and supplies to some areas, but there was no sign of government help in Balakot, a northern town of 30 000 where the quake levelled the main bazaar, crushing shoppers and sending gas cylinders, bricks, tomatoes and onions spilling into the streets.

Injured people covered by shawls lay in the street, waiting for medical care.

Residents carried bodies on wooden planks.

The bodies of four children, ages 4-6, lay under a sheet of corrugated iron.

Relatives said they were trying to find sheets to wrap the bodies.

"We don't have anything to bury them with," said a cousin, Saqib Swati.

Nearby, business administration student Faizan Farooq, 19, stood outside the rubble of his four-story school, where at least 250 pupils were feared trapped.

Dozens of villagers, some with sledgehammers but many without any tools, pulled at debris and carried away bodies.

>b>Cries for help

Farooq said at first, he'd heard children crying for help under the rubble.

"Now there's no sign of life," he said. "We can't do this without the army's help. Nobody has come here to help us."

A 40-year-old man at the scene wept, saying four of his children were under the debris.

Elsewhere in Balakot, shop owner Mohammed Iqbal said two primary schools also collapsed. He estimated that more than 500 pupils were feared dead.

Several International Federation of Red Cross trucks laden with tents, food, medicine and other aid were trying to reach the hard-hit areas in Pakistan, said Layla Berlemont, a spokesperson for the group in Islamabad.

She said the agency would use aircraft if the roads were blocked.

The US geological survey (USGS) reported 22 aftershocks - one of magnitude 6.2 - in the 24 hours after the main quake, which the USGS initially reported as 7.6, but later revised to 7.7.

An eight-member UN team of top disaster co-ordination arrived in Islamabad on Sunday and quickly began setting up centres to co-ordinate international relief efforts.

"We have to be quick," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokesperson for the group.

- AP