Quake death toll rises to 54,000

OFFICIALS last night sharply raised estimates of the dead from Pakistan’s monster quake to more than 54,000, while bad weather heaped more misery on hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors.

A fifth of the villages in the quake zone remained cut off eight days after the quake turned the lush mountainsides of the Himalayas into a death trap.

A spokesman for the prime minister of Pakistani Kashmir said at least 40,000 people died in the earthquake on October 8. Another 13,000 were killed in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, and about 1,350 in the part of Kashmir controlled by India.

Prime Minister Sikandar Hayat Khan Khan said: “Some people fear that the death toll could be 100,000 and they may be right.”

Confirmation of a final death toll will be difficult because many bodies are buried beneath the rubble.

Earlier, army spokesman Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan said a polio-stricken girl was rescued from the rubble of her home in the village of Sanger, near Balakot, eight days after the earthquake. But an army official in Balakot, Maj Majid Jahangir, cast doubt on the story.

Maj Jahangir said a polio-stricken girl of 10 or 11 was unable to walk and had been carried from the village by soldiers, but said she had not been buried in the rubble.

Torrential downpours halted airborne relief efforts in Kashmir, where the Pakistani military said one of its helicopters had crashed in bad weather, killing all six personnel aboard.