Villagers dug with bare hands into collapsed schools and homes yesterday in a desperate search for survivors of a huge earthquake that killed more than 30,000 in South Asia, with Pakistan calling it the country's worst-ever disaster and appealing for urgent help.
The vast majority of the deaths from Saturday's magnitude 7.6 quake were in Pakistan. Neighboring India reported several hundred.
More than 30,000 people, many of them students, died in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir, said Tariq Mahmmod, communications minister for the region.
PHOTO: EPA
"I have been informed by my department that more than 30,000 people have died in Kashmir," he told reporters.
Earlier, Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, had said his country's death toll was 19,136 -- 17,388 of them in Pakistani Kashmir -- and 42,397 were injured.
The worst-hit city was Pakistani Kashmir's capital, Muzaffarabad, where 11,000 died, Sherpao said.
Authorities in India reported 465 deaths and more than 900 people injured, while Afghanistan reported at least four deaths.
Saturday's quake, centered in Pakistani Kashmir, flattened dozens of villages, killing farmers, homemakers, soldiers and schoolchildren, and triggered landslides that blocked rescuers from many devastated areas where bodies lay in streets and villagers said they felt forsaken.
Many survivors in the region had spent the night without shelter in near-freezing temperatures. In India's portion of Kashmir, villagers burned wood from their own collapsed homes to stay warm.
"We are handling the worst disaster in Pakistan's history," said Major General Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's top military spokesman.
"We do seek international assistance," Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf said. "We have enough manpower, but we need financial support."
Offers of help came from across the globe, with China and Japan each dispatching emergency-response teams of several dozen people and Australia pledging A$500,000. The US earlier offered US$100,000, and the UN sent a team to coordinate the world body's disaster response.
The quake and its aftershocks were felt from central Afghanistan to western Bangladesh. Destruction was clustered around Pakistani Kashmir, with damaged buildings spanning at least 400km from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to Srinagar in northern Indian territory.
Pakistani rescue teams pulled two survivors from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Islamabad. The survivors, a boy and a woman who were listed in stable condition, said others were trapped alive and calling for help beneath the debris, said Adil Inayat, a doctor at Islamabad's PIMS hospital.
"These people heard voices and cries during the whole night," Inayat said. At least 24 people died in the building, and dozens were injured. Officials fear dozens are still trapped.
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.
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 and 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, Faizan Farooq, a 19-year-old business administration student, 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 the debris and carried away bodies.
A 40-year-old man at the scene wept. He said four of his children were buried in the debris.
The US Geological Survey reported 22 aftershocks, including a magnitude 6.2 temblor, in the 24 hours after the quake.
In India's Jammu-Kashmir state, most deaths occurred in the border towns of Uri, Tangdar and Punch and in the city of Srinagar, said B.B. Vyas, the state's divisional commissioner.
Afghanistan appeared to suffer the least damage, reporting only four deaths.
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