Pakistani quake toll may be in thousands

ISLAMABAD - Well over 1,000 people were killed in northern Pakistan and India last night as a massive earthquake buried children under schools, felled two apartment blocks in Islamabad and reduced mountain villages to rubble.

The death toll from the 7.6 magnitude quake, the region's strongest in living memory, was expected to climb further.

President Pervez Musharraf's spokesman, Major-General Shaukat Sultan, said "deaths could be running in the thousands" nationwide, as rescue teams were airlifted into the worst-affected areas where roads had been cut off by landslides.

Some 400 children were killed at two schools in North West Frontier Province, where around 1,000 people were feared dead. On Pakistan's side of Kashmir, the Himalayan region disputed with India, politicians said the toll would be worse.

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

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

The first quake was followed by 18 aftershocks which had magnitudes of between 4.6 and 6.3 over the next 10 hours.

They were felt across the subcontinent, shaking buildings in the Afghan, Indian and Bangladeshi capitals.

The US Geological Survey described the quake as major, saying it took place at a depth of 10 km (6.2 miles).

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

Pledges of international support started to come in within hours, but details of the damage were difficult to obtain because telephone lines were down, mobile networks were overwhelmed and relief efforts were hampered by both landslides and heavy rain.

Helicopters were flying teams into some areas, he said.

"Three-hundred-and-fifty school children have been killed in a school in Mansehra district and 50 were killed in another school in the same district," provincial police chief Riffat Pashar said.

"The situation is very bad, the figure has gone to about 1,000 feared dead in North West Frontier province," he said.

The Karakoram Highway linking Pakistan with western China was blocked in several places and Pakistan's remote Northern Areas had suffered extensive damage.

But the worst-hit area appeared to be Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, and its capital, Muzaffarabad, was badly hit.

Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao told Reuters the Kashmir government had told him that casualties were already in the hundreds and could reach 1,000.

"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.

The main road into Kashmir was blocked by landslides.

Oxfam Humanitarian Response Coordinator Raphael Sindaye said worsening weather could hamper relief efforts. "Winter is drawing in ... winterised tents and blankets will be urgently needed," Sindaye said, after a meeting of aid agencies in Islamabad.

On the Indian side of Kashmir, police said the earthquake had killed more than 300 people and injured hundreds.

Half of the 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 cease-fire line between India and Pakistan.

Landslides also blocked the 300-km (190-mile) 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.

In Islamabad, 82 people were pulled out alive from two multi-storey apartment blocks that were reduced to rubble.

But a government official said that rescuers also found the bodies of 10 people -- seven Pakistanis, an Egyptian and two Japanese, one of whom was a two-year-old child.

"The quake jolted me awake and I saw people running down the staircase," said Sabahat Ahmed, a resident of one of the blocks. "By the time the second tremor hit, the building had already started to collapse.

"As the building was collapsing people were still coming out from it," said Ahmed, who spoke as residents struggled to shift heavy concrete with their bare hands.

The initial quake lasted for about a minute and sent people fleeing from their homes in Islamabad. Minutes later, sirens could be heard as emergency vehicles began racing through the city of close to a million.

A girl was killed in Afghanistan, but authorities said the country appeared to have escaped the worst.

- REUTERS