Pakistani authorities on Thursday confirmed about 48Â 000 people died in the massive October 8 earthquake and said there were discrepancies in a higher toll given by provincial authorities.
Asked about a report that 79Â 000 people had died across South Asia in the disaster, Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said official figures by Thursday morning were far lower than that.
“There are about 48Â 000 confirmed dead as of today, the official toll, and it is expected to rise. I cannot comment on any other report. We say what we confirm officially and when we do it must have credibility,” Sherpao said.
The interior ministry said the earthquake killed 30Â 800 people in Pakistani Kashmir, 16Â 850 in North West Frontier province and about 100 elsewhere in Pakistan. India has also reported more than 1Â 300 dead in its part of Kashmir.
Authorities said they are double-checking a massive jump in the toll to 37Â 958 for Pakistan’s North West Frontier province alone, which was announced on Wednesday by regional officials and not confirmed by the government.
“This is inflated, it is not credible,” a senior federal government official said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to discuss the casualty figures.
“We have asked for a recheck of the toll that we got from local officials,” North West Frontier province information minister Asif Iqbal Daudzai said.
He said the figure included those who were “missing, whose whereabouts are not known and we presume they are dead” — although many thousands of people also fled the area after the quake and have not yet returned.
“The death toll we received from local officials in the North West Frontier province was more than 37Â 000, but there are some discrepancies in the toll. We are checking that,” added an official at the provincial crisis-management cell.
The central government has also refused to confirm the prime minister of Pakistani Kashmir’s statement on Sunday that the death toll in his region was at least 40Â 000.
Sherpao said the government is conducting a physical survey of quake-battered regions through both central government and local officials to determine the true toll.
“Our death toll is gathered from different sources involving several tiers of the government, including revenue officials, army officials [and] local administration, and only then do we give the figure,” he said.
‘Worse than the tsunami’
The United Nations’s top relief official warned on Thursday that the shortfall in aid for victims of the earthquake in Pakistan makes the situation worse than after the Indian Ocean tsunami last year.
“This is not enough. We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever. We thought the tsunami was the worst we could get. This is worse,” Jan Egeland told journalists.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan begged the world to do more to prevent a second wave of deaths from Pakistan’s earthquake as troops on Thursday set up new helipads to reach survivors cut off for nearly two weeks.
Annan made a strongly worded appeal for “immediate and exceptional escalation of the global relief effort” as the merciless Himalayan winter sets in for three million people made homeless by the October 8 catastrophe.
“That means a second, massive wave of death will happen if we do not step up our efforts now,” Annan said at the UN headquarters in New York.
He said he will go in person next week to a UN-sponsored donors’ conference in Geneva on the disaster, and urged governments to attend at the highest level.
“I expect results,” he said. “There are no excuses. If we are to show ourselves worthy of calling ourselves members of humankind, we must rise to this challenge.”
Annan complained that donors have only made firm commitments of 12% of the UN flash appeal of $312-million, while the Asian tsunami appeal last December had been more than 80% funded within 10 days of the disaster.
More tents needed
Pakistani authorities who are still providing the backbone of the relief effort welcomed Annan’s comments.
“We agree with what Kofi Annan said. We need more tents and blankets, nothing else. The food supplies are getting there, but we need more tents and blankets,” said Major Farooq Nasir, an army spokesperson in the devastated Pakistani Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad.
The military said it is further stepping up its drive to get to the most remote areas using helicopters, mules and foot soldiers and will open 24 new helipads on Thursday for quake aid flights in the Kashmiri mountains.
The helipads will be set up outside Muzaffarabad in the devastated Jhelum and Neelum valleys, which are only now seeing road links restored.
But hopes began to fade that another potential boost to the relief effort — opening the disputed border in Kashmir with India — would happen in the immediate future.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf proposed on Tuesday to open the de facto border after nearly six decades to let relatives help each other after the catastrophe.
But a foreign ministry official in New Delhi said Pakistan has sent no concrete details and that India has made no moves to open up Kashmir, where an insurgency against Indian rule has been raging for a decade and a half.
Global Green Peace, a private group working to demine the volatile frontier, warned that the disaster may have shifted thousands of landmines, posing a new hazard for earthquake survivors. — AFP