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Quake rescue teams face grim truth

Bulldozers move in as search for survivors winding down

Afp, Muzaffarabad
The search for survivors was winding down yesterday five days after Pakistan's massive earthquake even though vast isolated stretches of the lower Himalayas remain cut off, officials said.
Teams from Turkey and Britain gave up their search in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, which was almost completely levelled, as attention turned to bringing relief to desperate survivors.
"The teams are leaving but the decision to announce the end will be taken by the government," said Alain Pasche, the UN search team coordinator.
But many frantic residents refused to lose hope, with parents digging with their bare hands through the rubble of the Rizwan school, hoping their children will not add to Pakistan's more than 25,000 earthquake dead.
Man Sabar Naqui, 50, was looking for his two sons aged six and seven.
"I have found one of the bodies of one of their friends but there is only a 10 percent chance that my sons are alive," he said.
Russian and South Korean teams kept up their work here, while Spanish and Dutch teams were also refusing to give up at a collapsed school in nearby Bagh.
"There is little chance of finding anyone alive but still there is a sliver of
hope and that's why we're working," said Andrei Fiodorov, a Russian team member with a sniffer dog.
"When the excavators are being used it means there is no hope anymore."
But the army was doing just that, bringing in heavy earth-moving equipment to parts of the ravaged Himalayan city.
"We have done what we could manually. Now we need a machine to clear the dead bodies," said an army officer in charge of one of the clearing operations.
Villagers who kept pouring into the major population centers of northern Pakistan said that no
search teams made it to mountain regions razed by Saturday's earthquake of 7.6 on the Richter scale.
"No search team came to our village. Most people have fled and there are only the injured left," said Zaman, 28, who walked from his village to Balakot, a city of 40,000 people reduced to tents.
In the remote town of Bagh, Dutch and Spanish rescue teams were still looking through the rubble of a collapsed school for hundreds of boys and girls who have been missing since the quake.
Army Major Khalid Hussain said he could not count the dead in the town.
"We have suffered massive loss but we cannot give you an exact figure. Presently the biggest task of the army is to restore road links to the hundreds of villages which are cut off," he said.
Officials have put the toll at more than 25,000 dead and 63,000 injured in Pakistan's worst natural disaster with another 2.5 million homeless. The quake also killed 1,329 people in Indian-administered Kashmir, police said.
Despite the dimming hopes of survivors, the British volunteer team Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID) earlier Thursday was still searching for a 20-year-old woman they believed to be alive under a collapsed house in Muzaffarabad's old city.
Team leader Garry de la Pomerai said they had worked late into the night Wednesday but the structure was unsteady and part of their tunnelling had collapsed.
"We're now going to try to send in a combined force of all the teams and taking in the best equipment available. We still believe she is alive down there," he said.
"No one can take a decision to stop searching if they think there is someone alive."