BALAKOT (AP):
OFFICIALS YESTERDAY sharply raised estimates of the dead from Pakistan's monster quake to more than 54,000, while bad weather dumped more misery on hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors.
Twenty per cent of the villages in the quake zone remained cut off eight days after the temblor turned the lush mountainsides of the Himalayas into a death trap.
At least 40,000 people in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir died in South Asia's earthquake on October 8, said a spokesman for Sikandar Hayat Khan, the Prime Minister of the region. That would push the total death toll in the disaster to more than 54,000, including more than 13,000 in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province and about 1,350 in the part of divided Kashmir that India controls.
DEATH TOLL
"The death toll is not less than 40,000," said Abdul Khaliq Wasi, spokesman for Khan. He said officials in Kashmir had not counted all the bodies, and described the 40,000 figure as "a closest estimate."
Khan earlier had told Pakistan's Geo television the toll could eventually be higher still.
"Some people fear that the death toll could be 100,000 and they may be right," he said.
Confirmation of a final death toll will be difficult because many bodies are buried beneath the rubble.
"The United Nations is still operating on the government's official numbers," said Andrew MacLeod, humanitarian affairs officer with the U.N. Coordination and Assessment Team. "There are regions that still have not been reached, and the death toll is not final."
Central government officials in Islamabad said, late yesterday, that the confirmed casualty toll from the earthquake was 39,422 dead and 65,038 injured.
Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said a polio-stricken infant girl was rescued yesterday from the rubble of her home in the village of Sanger near Balakot eight days after the earthquake. But the account of an army official in Balakot, Maj. Majid Jahangir, casts doubt on the story.
Jahangir said a polio-stricken girl of 10 or 11 years old was unable to walk and had been carried from the village by soldiers, but said she had not been buried in the rubble.
TORRENTIAL DOWNPOURS
Yesterday, torrential downpours halted airborne relief efforts in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, where the Pakistani military said one of its relief helicopters had crashed in bad weather, killing all six military personnel aboard.
The MI-17 transport helicopter was returning home late Saturday after dropping off relief workers in Bagh. The cause of the crash was suspected to be the weather or a technical malfunction.
Bagh is one of the areas worst hit by the massive 7.6-magnitude quake, and relief workers have been unable to provide enough temporary shelters for residents, let alone for villagers who have streamed in from the mountains. Yesterday, mud rushed through the streets of the shattered town like a river, and water saturated the fields used for relief helicopter landings.
