18,000 reported dead in Asia quake
More than 18,000 people were killed when a powerful earthquake struck northern Pakistan, a military spokesman said today, in a disaster that entombed hundreds of children in their schools, flattened a high-rise apartment building in the Pakistani capital and devastated an untold number of villages.
The 7.6-magnitude quake struck just after 8:50 a.m. yesterday in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and reverberated across a swath of northern Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. The epicenter was in a mountainous region about 60 miles northeast of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan told Pakistan's Geo television network today that 17,000 of the dead were in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. Thousands more were wounded and missing. In India, the death toll was in the hundreds.
But rescue teams have yet to reach many areas, including Balakot, a town in northern Pakistan that was reduced to rubble. Survivors here said that at least 5,000 people were killed in the town, but that number could not be confirmed.
Hundreds more were missing in the debris in Balakot, including hundreds of children buried in the wreckage of 10 schools, survivors said. With rescuers thwarted by landslides and heavy rainfall, parents clawed through the rubble looking for their children.
A woman who gave her name only as Saira sat in the ruins next to her child's body. "I have lost everything," she said. "This is God's wrath."
In the town of Garhi Habibullah, residents said about 300 bodies had been recovered from the ruins of a girls school there. Five hundred other students were injured.
"Many villages have been wiped out in the earthquake-hit areas of the province," a witness, Abdul Makjeed, said by phone from Mansehra, near Garhi Habibullah.
In Islamabad, rescuers worked into the night trying to save scores of people believed trapped in the rubble of an apartment complex in an upscale district of the capital. At least 20 people were killed and 85 others injured when one building in the Margalla Towers complex collapsed and another was severely damaged.
Soon after the quake struck, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said the country's armed forces had helicopters and C-130 transport planes ready to ship emergency relief supplies into the affected areas.