Aftershocks hamper rescue efforts

Strong aftershocks have sent rescuers fleeing from the search for survivors of the El Salvador earthquake.

More than 300 people are believed to have died in the disaster.

Workers rescued a 22-year-old man trapped for 30 hours under slabs of concrete, reviving dwindling hopes that more survivors might be found in a landslide in Las Colinas, a neighbourhood near the capital San Salvador.

As the death toll rose from Saturday's magnitude 7.6 quake, President Francisco Flores said he had asked Colombia for 3,000 coffins and overwhelmed officials began to bury some victims in common graves.

The strongest of more than 660 aftershocks led rescuers to scale back digging in Las Colinas, which was buried by dirt that came crashing down from a mountainside.

"We still don't know anything," said Gladis de Carman, searching for her missing daughter and crying as she spoke on a cell phone to her mother. "And now the ground is shaking again under us".

Body-hunting dogs, sent in from the United States and Mexico, sniffed for the living and the dead under the blinding sun at Las Colinas.

The quake off El Salvador's coast was felt from northern Panama to central Mexico - a distance of more than 1,100 miles.

Workers at a temporary mortuary near the disaster scene said 182 bodies had been pulled from Las Colinas on Sunday.

The National Emergency Committee earlier reported 193 dead, 350 injured and 1,000 missing nationwide. But the count of the dead from Las Colinas alone would increase the committee's number by at least 100.