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TREMOR

Hopes for survivors fade fast

REUTERS, Muzaffarabad
Hope was fading yesterday of finding survivors among thousands buried under houses and schools by an earthquake in northern Pakistan and rescuers pleaded for more helicopters to bring relief to remote areas.
President Pervez Musharraf' s government sought more international support for a disaster that officials in the worst-hit areas of Pakistani Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province said may have claimed up to 40,000 lives.
Another 2,000 people are feared to have been killed across the border in Indian Kashmir.
The United States pledged an initial $50 million for emergency aid. Several
transport aircraft have been sent with relief supplies, heavy equipment and a humanitarian coordination team and further flights were due to arrive on Tuesday.
European nations, Japan and Gulf Arab states also stepped forward with similar offers of support.
The official death toll from the quake -- at 7.6 magnitude the biggest to hit the region in a century -- remained at 21,000 in Pakistan and slightly over 1,200 in India.
Asked about reports that around 30,000 to 40,000 people had been killed, Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told Reuters: "It's all guesswork. Our figures are 20,000 plus."
Reuters reporters flying over
stricken areas saw villages and towns flattened. Nearly every building in Muzaffarabad, a once-pretty river town that is the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, was destroyed or damaged.
Rescuers, many of them desperate relatives scrabbling with their bare hands, worked through the rubble in the hope that they might be able to save trapped people.
Medical experts say an unhurt man can last for three days without water and a woman four days, which means time is running out -- although in such catastrophes there are often stories of miraculous survival.
"We are still looking for bodies in the debris," said A.M. Khandy, deputy commissioner in the Indian
Kashmir district of Karnah. "It is a calamity that is overwhelming our resources."
The stench of decomposing bodies rose from beneath the collapsed homes in towns reached by journalists and relief teams, where a lack of drinking water and broken sewage systems posed a risk of contagious disease outbreaks.
Desperate people grabbed whatever they could from partially damaged shops, but there were also cases of outright looting. During the night, troops fired in the air to scare off a gang that had repeatedly raided a supply depot in Muzaffarabad.
Musharraf asked for more helicopters to bring medical supplies, food and other relief to communities cut off in the region's rugged mountains, the foothills of the Himalayas.
UN officials said the situation was desperate.