Earthquake death toll rises to 30,000 

Pakistani soldiers work at a collapsed building following the earthquake in Islamabad. Picture / Reuters

MANSEHRA, Pakistan - The death toll from the huge earthquake in Pakistan and India has risen to more than 30,000, according to Kashmir's Minister for Works and Communication, Tariq Farooq.

Pakistan's military said earlier that at least 18,000 died.  It was reported that 41,000 were injured.

Rescuers continued to dig out the corpses of hundreds of children buried under their schools and found villages reduced to rubble.

Teams laboured with cranes and earth-moving equipment, or scrabbled with their bare hands in driving rain, in the hope of finding survivors trapped in shattered masonry. Scores were plucked out alive, but many more dead.

Some 400 children died at two schools in North West Frontier Province, where around 1,000 people were feared killed by the 7.6 magnitude quake, South Asia's strongest for 100 years.

"When the earthquake came it was like Judgment Day," said villager Fazal Elahi, recalling the horror of houses collapsing around him as he grieved quietly next to the body of his 14-year-old daughter.

Pakistan's side of Kashmir, the Himalayan region disputed with India, was at least as badly hit. The country's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, earlier told Reuters the Kashmir government believed the toll there could reach 1000.

"A number of villages in Kashmir were wiped out ... We are facing difficulties in reaching those areas as most of the roads there are either blocked or wiped out by the landslides," Sherpao said.

A military spokesman said that about 200 Pakistani soldiers were killed in the hardest-hit areas.

Indian Kashmir was also hammered by the earthquake. Police there said that more than 300 people had been killed and hundreds injured.

Half of the Indian deaths were in Uri, the last big town on the road connecting the two sides of the violence-scarred region. The dead included 15 soldiers, some in bunkers close to the military ceasefire line between India and Pakistan.

Landslides blocked the 300-km road that connects Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, to the rest of India to the south. The Srinagar-Muzaffarabad road linking Indian and Pakistani Kashmir, reopened this year to traffic for the first time in nearly 60 years, was also blocked.

The earthquake struck at 4.50pm Saturday NZ time and was centred in forest-clad mountains of Pakistani Kashmir, near the Indian border, about 95 km northeast of Islamabad.

The tremor, which the US Geological Survey said took place at a depth of 10 km, was felt across the subcontinent, and shook buildings in the Afghan, Indian and Bangladeshi capitals.

The first quake was followed over the next 12 hours by 19 aftershocks with magnitudes of between 4.5 and 6.3.

Ghulam Rashool, an official at the Pakistan Metrological Department, said it was the strongest earthquake in the South Asian subcontinent since the 1905 Kangra earthquake that killed 20,000 people in India's Madhya Pradesh state.

- REUTERS, HERALD ONLINE STAFF