Turkey's PM first foreign leader in quake zone

Turkey’s prime minister became the first foreign leader to visit South Asia’s quake zone today, a day after the UN urged the world to do more to help the disaster’s 3.3 million homeless victims before the harsh Himalayan winter threatens their survival.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who arrived in Pakistan yesterday and pledged one million blankets, tents and food, surveyed the ruins by helicopter before landing in the capital of Pakistan’s part of Kashmir to meet with Turkish relief workers.

Helicopters resumed their regular sorties at daybreak, taking aid to remote villages and ferrying back the injured.

Soldiers were also moving by foot into the hills, carrying supplies on their backs.

Officials estimate that at least 79,000 people died in the October 8 quake and 3.3 million were left homeless – many more than the number displaced by last December’s tsunami that hit Indonesia and other Asian countries – and in a mountainous region posing much bigger logistical challenges for authorities.