Pakistan: Whole generation lost in quake
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-10-11 05:54

And the quake may have killed up to 2,000 people in India-controlled Kashmir, Naeem Akhtar, a senior government official, said yesterday.

People mourns deaths of their family members, Sunday, Oct. 9, 2005, killed by a huge earthquake in Gari Habibullah, 90 kilometers (56 miles) from Islamabad, Pakistan. [AP]

The fate of about 10,000 people living in the mountains was not yet known as many villages were still inaccessible after Saturday's earthquake, Akhtar said.

In Pakistan, Sultan said foreign rescue teams were setting up field hospitals to cope with the tide of tens of thousands of people who were injured by the quake.

"The Spanish rescue team with a field hospital is being placed in Bagh, the French rescue team along with a field hospital is being placed in Rawalakot," he said.

Aid teams from Britain and Turkey were headed to Muzaffarabad while teams from Japan, China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates will be sent to Balakot, Batagram and other parts of Mansehra, he said.

Witnesses and correspondents say schools collapsed in almost every town and village across devastated northwestern Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir.

Many hundreds were trapped in the wreckage because the quake struck at the beginning of the school day and parents have been desperately digging at the rubble in the increasingly vain hope of getting them out.

In the northwestern town of Balakot, a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl were pulled alive from the rubble of their school two days after the quake struck, an AFP photographer said.