Pakistan’s interior ministry said on Sunday that more than 19 000 people died in the huge earthquake that shook parts of South Asia on Saturday, while India raised its toll to 583.
”So far, we have 19 136 people [who] lost their lives, 42 397 were injured. Casualties are increasing by the hour,” Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao told a news conference in Islamabad.
The earthquake measured 7,6 on the Richter scale. Pakistan on Sunday declared three days of national mourning for the victims of the devastating quake.
Sherpao said the worst-affected area was Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where the confirmed figures so far are 17 388 dead and 40 421 injured.
About 11 000 of the deaths were in the region’s capital, Muzaffarabad, alone, he said.
In North West Frontier province, 1 760 people were killed and 1 797 injured he said, while in the central province of Punjab 11 died and 83 were injured. In the Northern Areas bordering China and Kashmir, a further two people were killed and two injured.
Another Pakistani official, the Kashmir region’s minister for works and communication, Tariq Farooq, said an estimated 30 000 people were killed in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir alone.
”Our rough estimates say more than 30 000 people have died in the earthquake in Kashmir,” he said.
”There are cities, there are towns which have been completely destroyed. Muzaffarabad is devastated,” he added, referring to the capital of Pakistan’s sector of disputed Kashmir.
The worst-hit place was Bagh, 40km south-east of Muzaffarabad, Farooq said. Between 6 000 and 7 000 people are estimated to have died in the town and adjoining areas, Farooq said.
”There are no survivors in villages like Jaglari, Kufalgarh, Harigal and Baniyali in Bagh district,” Farooq said. ”People have been devoured by the earth.”
Meanwhile, Indian state government chief secretary Vijay Bakaya said 583 people died in Jammu and Kashmir, and 300 in Uri sector alone, close to the de facto border with Pakistan.
”The toll is likely to go up,” he added.
There were also reports of a few casualties in towns and villages in southern Afghanistan.
Anger over pace of rescue efforts
Meanwhile, reports Matthew Rosenberg, angry villagers briefly blocked roads on Sunday in earthquake-ravaged regions of Indian-controlled Kashmir, protesting the slow pace of rescue and aid efforts in reaching their destroyed homes.
In India, collapsed homes and shops lined the streets of towns and villages nestled in Tangdar’s deep valleys.
The Indian army has flown in planeloads of medicines, food and drinking water to the worst-hit Baramulla district, said Jammu-Kashmir state’s Chief Secretary, Vijay Bakaya . More than 1 000 tents were being distributed in remote villages flattened by the quake.
Soldiers and volunteers used bulldozers and bare hands on Sunday to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble of houses and buildings.
However, many people complained that they had received no help from government agencies and the military.
About 200 angry residents blocked the main road between Baramulla and the border town of Uri for about 45 minutes on Sunday, demanding that soldiers with aid and journalists go to their mountainside villages, which they said were being ignored.
”Everything is destroyed — the ground shook and took everything down,” said Syad Hassan, pointing toward the peaks surrounding the valley road.
The quake killed at least 65 people in his home village, Namala, and three neighbouring villages, he said, but no aid had been provided to them.
”All the government people, the press people, they are just driving past,” he said.
Farid Khan, a farmer in Jabla, a village about 110km north of Srinagar, told an Associated Press reporter: ”No one has come to help us. Yesterday, we buried 20 people in the village, including my five-year-old daughter. We don’t know how many more people are lying under the debris.”
Khan watched helplessly as his wife lay writhing in pain on a cot nearby, her ribs broken after their house collapsed.
Difficult conditions
Officials blamed the slow response on difficult conditions in the area.
Heavy rains overnight hampered rescuers and relief distribution, said BB Vyas, divisional commissioner of Jammu-Kashmir. Mud, debris and knee-high slush from landslides blocked roads, cutting off many remote villages.
Most people in Jammu-Kashmir spent the night in the open, lighting fires with wood pulled out from fallen houses to keep warm in the near-freezing temperatures.
At least two aftershocks early on Sunday sent people scurrying into the streets in Srinagar.
Most of India’s deaths occurred in the border towns of Uri, Tangdar and Punch, and in Srinagar city, Vyas said.
Officials in India fear their country’s death toll will rise as severed telephone lines are restored and more reports come in from isolated villages. About 900 people were injured, said Bakaya.
”The figure may rise as details come in about damaged houses and the numbers [of dead] could go up,” said Bakaya, the state’s chief secretary.
Among the dead were 39 soldiers from the army and paramilitary forces who perished in landslides along the Line of Control that separates the Indian and Pakistani portions of Kashmir, said Colonel H Juneja, an army spokesperson.
Telephone, water and electricity supplies were disrupted across much of the state.
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. — Sapa-AP, AFP