India's quake toll rises to 250
Today’s powerful earthquake in southern Asia killed at least 250 people across Indian Kashmir, a senior state official said in the Himalayan region.
Thousands of buildings and houses across the state collapsed.
Most of the deaths occurred in the border towns of Uri, Tangdar and Punch, and in the city of Srinagar, the summer capital of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, said B B Vyas, the state’s divisional commissioner.
The 7.6-magnitude earthquake near the Pakistan-India killed more than 2,000 people in both nations.
In the capitals of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, buildings shook and walls swayed for about a minute, and panicked people ran from their homes and offices.
Among the more than 250 people killed in Indian Kashmir were 20 soldiers who perished in landslides along the Line of Control that separates the Indian and Pakistani portions of Kashmir, said Colonel H Juneja, an army spokesman.
About another 1,000 people died in Pakistani Kashmir, said Sardar Mohammed Anwar, the top government official in the area, warning that the death toll could rise.
At least 850 people were injured when houses and buildings collapsed across India’s Jammu-Kashmir state, Vyas said.
Soldiers and volunteers were still pulling people from the rubble of the some 2,700 homes destroyed or damaged in Jammu-Kashmir, he said.
Officials said the official death toll in Jammu-Kashmir could increase as telephone lines are restored and more reports come in.
“The figure may rise as details come in about damaged houses and the numbers (of dead) could go up,” said Vijay Bakaya, Jammu-Kashmir state’s chief secretary.
In Kunzru, near Srinagar, almost all the village’s 200 homes were flattened by the quake.
“The floor started shaking, and everything turned upside down,” Ghulam Mohi-udin Khan, a villager, said from a hospital where he was being treated for a fractured leg. His wife lay on an adjacent cot, bandages covering a head wound inflicted by masonry that fell as their house collapsed.
Many residents of Kunzru sat in open fields and waited for relief supplies. Most had not eaten all day because they were observing Ramadan, the roughly month-long Muslim holiday during which the devout fast from dawn to dusk.
Two of Kashmir’s main highways were closed because of landslides triggered by the quake, and aid was being flown to some of the worst hit areas, Bakaya said. Telephone, water and electricity supplies were disrupted across much of the state.
At least 400 tents were flown by helicopter to Uri and Tangdar, and with freezing temperatures in the Himalayan foothills at night, officials were trying to set them up before nightfall.
Teams of doctors and Red Cross volunteers were travelling by road and on foot to remote areas in the mountains to provide emergency medical care, Bakaya said.
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