Pakistan death toll more than 25,000

Pakistani earthquake survivors wake up after sleeping in the street in Balakot, Pakistan, yesterday. An aftershock jolted parts of Pakistan, panicking hungry, homeless survivors of last weekend's devastating earthquake. PHOTO: AP

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.

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.