Pakistan yesterday raised the official death toll from last week's massive earthquake to more than 25,000, with some 63,000 injured.
"The official death toll is 25,000 plus and the number of injured is more than 63,000," chief military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said.
The 7.6-magnitude quake devastated large swathes in the country's north and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir when it struck on Saturday morning.
PHOTO: AP
Sultan said Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, was the worst-hit area where the "maximum number of casualties have been reported." More than 11,000 people perished there, officials have said.
Thousands more died in Bagh and Rawalakot, also near the epicenter in Kashmir, and at least four big towns in North West Frontier Province.
The spokesman said the number of army casualties was 452 dead and some 730 injured. Troops blasted open a key footpath to isolated mountain villages in Pakistan Thursday, while locals used rafts to bring the first aid to areas cut off when a bridge was downed by a huge quake.
Hundreds of people who were desperate to discover the fate of their families surged through after army engineers dynamited and bulldozered a landslide blocking the route out of Muzaffarabad. With brightly colored sheets full of food and bottled water over their shoulders, they moved on up the treacherous path towards the Neelum Valley, where even the helicopters have not been able to land since Saturday's disaster.
Shabbir Shah Gilani, 38, a businessman living in the southern city of Karachi, arrived in Muzaffarabad yesterday morning after hearing no news for six days about the village where he was born.
"Fourteen members of my family still live there and I have to find out about them. I heard from people who have been able to get out that all the villages have been crushed by the earthquake," he said.
Around Muzaffarabad whole mountainsides sloughed off during the quake, crushing villages and wrecking the only bridge to valleys in the immediate north.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland arrived in Pakistan yesterday to work on relief efforts.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS