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Asian quake death toll at least 20,000
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-09 21:30
Injured people covered by shawls lay in the street, waiting for medical care.
Residents carried bodies on wooden planks. The corpses of four children, aged
between 4 and 6, lay under a sheet of corrugated iron. Relatives said they were
trying to find sheets to wrap the bodies.
"We don't have anything to bury them with," said a cousin, Saqib Swati.
Elsewhere in Balakot, shop owner Mohammed Iqbal said two primary schools, one
for boys and one for girls, also collapsed. More than 500 students were feared
dead.
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf appealed to the international community for
medicine, tents, cargo helicopters and financial assistance.
"We do seek international assistance. We have enough manpower but we need
financial support ... to cope with the tragedy," Musharraf said.
Supplies were needed "to reach out to the people in far-flung and cut-off
areas," he said in Rawalpindi, a city near the capital Islamabad, before leaving
on a tour of devastated areas.
The United States, the United Nations, Britain, Russia, China, Turkey, Japan
and Germany all offered assistance.
In Pakistan's northwestern district of Mansehra, police
chief Ataullah Khan Wazir said Saturday that authorities there pulled 250 bodies
from the rubble of a girls' school in the village of Ghari Habibibullah. Dozens
of children were feared killed in other schools.
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