Quake kills more than 30,000
Villagers dug with bare hands into collapsed schools and homes today in desperate searches for survivors of a huge earthquake that killed more than 30,000 in South Asia.
Pakistan described the quake as the country’s worst-ever disaster and appealed for urgent help.
The vast majority of the deaths from Saturday’s magnitude 7.6 quake were in Pakistan. Neighbouring India reported several hundred.
More than 30,000 people, many of them students, died in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir, said Tariq Mahmmod, communications minister for the region.
“I have been informed by my department that more than 30,000 people have died in Kashmir,” he told The Associated Press.
Earlier, Pakistan’s interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao had said his country’s death toll was 19,136 – 17,388 of them in Pakistani Kashmir – and 42,397 were injured.
The worst-hit city was Pakistani Kashmir’s capital, Muzaffarabad, where 11,000 died, Sherpao said.
Authorities in India reported 465 deaths and more than 900 people injured, while Afghanistan reported at least four deaths.
