Rescuers dig out last bodies from Iran quake

Mohammad Taheri fainted when his mother’s body was unearthed today, one of the victims of an earthquake in Iran that destroyed about 100 villages and killed 220 people.

Rescuers in Changooreh, among the worst hit of the northwestern villages rocked by Saturday’s magnitude-six quake, had dug up at least 140 bodies from the debris by early today.

‘‘This looks like a scene from a Second World War movie,’’ said rescue worker Majid Elahi, gazing out from a mound of brick and mud that was once a home.

State radio estimated that the death toll was 220 dead and 1,300 injured.

Taheri, 40, followed the rescuers. ‘‘Mother, where are you. Why are you buried in the dirt,’’ he cried.

Sniffer dogs identified a spot and a bulldozer soon began digging. It was the body of Khadijeh Esmaili, Taheri’s mother.

Rescue workers and villagers sprinkled water on Taheri’s face to revive him, after he fainted at the sight of her body.

The quake struck at 7.30am when most people were in their homes.

Zahra Mehri, 38, said she came to Changooreh from Tehran to discover that 15 relatives were dead, including her mother.

‘‘There is nothing I can say except that this is horrible,’’ she said. ‘‘I think the worst is still to come because we are at the beginning and we are still too shocked to understand what happened.’’

For some, the loss was too much to bear.

When Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari arrived in Changooreh yesterday, a grief-stricken young man who had lost his whole family hurled insults at the minister, and then threw stones that broke the windows of an nearby ambulance.

Lari, one of the minister’s bodyguards, calmed the man down.

‘‘Our job was to recover the bodies, but from today we have to think of reconstruction during the summer, before it gets cold in the winter,’’ he said.

The quake hit the provinces of Gilan, Tehran, Kurdestan, Qazvin, Zanjan and Hamedan and was followed by several aftershocks. It was felt in Tehran - Iran’s capital - but there were no reports of damage there.

The government declared three days of mourning in the quake-struck provinces and established a bank account for public donations.