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.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS