A powerful earthquake in northern Iran killed at least 500 people and injured more than 1,500 yesterday, razing dozens of mountain villages whose mud-brick homes crumbled to dust.
The death toll was set to rise, said the official IRNA news agency, with many people still trapped in rubble created in an instant by a quake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale.
Helicopters and rescue teams rushed to search for survivors in the grape-growing area around the epicenter Avaj, 200km due west of the capital Tehran but far further by road.
The quake struck in the early morning, just before 7:30am, killing many women, children and elderly at home while men were out working in the fields and vineyards.
Villagers in Esmailabad, 10km north of Avaj, recovered 38 bodies -- one in nine of the population -- and picked through the dusty ruins to look for more of the missing, feared trapped among the wooden roof joists that jutted into the air.
Mohsen, 12, is now alone -- his three sisters, brother, mother, father and grandmother all died but he had set out for school. Wide-eyed, silent and shaking, he stood before the tangled rubble of his home nestled in the mountains.
"I've lost everyone," another man wailed as he poured earth over his head.
Women squatted in the dust, crying out as they rocked back and forth. A Muslim cleric read a prayer for the dead laid out in the village square before relatives buried them on a hill.
IRNA said some 60 villages around Avaj had been razed to the ground or lost at least half of their buildings, with a pair of early strong aftershocks inflicting more damage.
A medical official in Qazvin, the regional center, said 206 dead had been taken to one hospital in the city and 170 to another.
The town's Red Crescent head, Majid Shalviri, told IRNA more than 500 people were now confirmed dead in the natural disaster.
Ambulances screamed along the road to Qazvin, delivering more dead and wounded to hospitals from which patients able to move were discharged to make room.
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