ZARAND, Iran: Rescuers pulled two young women alive from the rubble of their remote mountain village in southeastern Iran yesterday, more than 24 hours after a powerful earthquake struck, killing at least 459 people.

Dozens of corpses were still being found as well, leading Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari to predict the death toll from Tuesday's magnitude 6.4 quake would likely reach 550.

"Fifty villages are badly damaged, four or five of which are 100 per cent destroyed," he said during a tour of the area.

The minister's convoy was earlier besieged on a mountain road by a few dozen angry villagers, some brandishing sticks and stones, who claimed that aid was slow in arriving.

Hampered by fog, snow and badly damaged roads, locals and soldiers used their bare hands and shovels to remove the mounds of mud and debris in a frantic search for survivors.

Hardest hit were about a dozen villages to the north of the town of Zarand, 700 kilometres from Teheran, where fragile one-storey homes collapsed into piles of mud and broken tiles.

Rescuers' desperate search for survivors was rewarded in the village of Houdkan, about 30 kilometres from Zarand, when a passerby heard the cries of a trapped woman. Zahra Mirzai, 18, later emerged virtually unscathed. The rest of her family died.

"She was barely hurt," said one of the rescuers, Amir, who refused to give his family name.

"When I asked her what happened she said that as soon as she felt the quake she ran towards the door and stood under the frame because she had heard it is a safe place," he said.

Zahra Hosseini, 25, was pulled smiling but complaining of back pains from under another pile of bricks and mud in the same village.

The earthquake came just 14 months after a devastating quake hit the desert citadel city of Bam, in the same province, killing 31,000 people.

Revolutionary Guardsman Hossein Maroufi said many corpses were still trapped under the rubble of Houdkan which had been home to about 500 people.

"Yesterday we removed 120 corpses. This morning we have taken out 26 and we are expecting up to 100 more," he said.

(China Daily 02/24/2005 page8)