Victims of the south Asian earthquake take shelter in a sports stadium in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, on Monday. Bodies lie in the streets and villagers pulled debris from collapsed schools and mud-brick homes with their bare hands in a desperate bid to find survivors.
MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - Shopkeepers clashed with looters Monday while hungry families waiting for relief supplies huddled under tents in the aftermath of Pakistan's worst earthquake. Death toll estimates ranged from 20,000 to 30,000.
Eight U.S. military helicopters from Afghanistan arrived in Islamabad with provisions, and Washington pledged up to $50 million in relief and reconstruction aid, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said.
The United Nations said more than 2.5 million people were left homeless by Saturday's monster 7.6-magnitude quake, and doctors warned of an outbreak of disease unless more relief arrives soon.
With landslides blocking roads to many of the worst-hit areas, Pakistan's army was flying food, water and medicine into the disaster zone. International relief efforts cranked into action, and an American plane full of relief supplies landed at an air base near Pakistan's capital on Monday.
In the shattered streets of Muzaffarabad, where at least 11,000 people died, an Associated Press reporter saw shopkeepers scuffle with people trying to break into businesses. They beat each other with sticks and threw stones, and some people suffered head wounds. No police were nearby.
Residents of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan's portion of divided Kashmir, said looters also targeted deserted homes. Survivors lacked food and water, and there was little sign of any official coordination of relief in the devastated city of 600,000.
An eight-member team of British rescuers using a sniffer dog, drills, chain saws and crowbars pulled a 20-year-old tailor from the rubble on Monday afternoon, 54 hours after a two-story building collapsed over him and dozens of others.
“I haven't eaten in three days, but I'm not hungry,” said Tariq, who suffered a leg injury and was carried away on a door serving as a stretcher. He had been trapped beneath concrete and wooden beams, and a dead body lay on either side of him.
About 2,000 people huddled around campfires through the cold night on a soccer field on the city's university campus, where most buildings had collapsed and hundreds were feared buried in classrooms and dormitories. Soldiers burrowed into the concrete with shovels and iron bars.
On the soccer field, Mohammed Ullah Khan, 50, said a few biscuits handed out by relief workers was all he had to eat for three days. His wife, who suffered a fractured leg, was wrapped in a yellow quilt beside him.
Their three-story home had collapsed in the quake. His family of 10 survived because they were on the top floor, which crashed to the ground. “My children are now on a hillside, under the open sky, with nothing to eat,” he said.
A doctor, Iqbal Khan, said there was a serious risk of diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia if drinking water and other relief supplies do not arrive quickly. “These people feel as if there is no one to take care of them,” he said.
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said the earthquake was the country's worst on record and appealed for urgent help, particularly cargo helicopters to reach remote areas.
U.S. forces in Afghanistan prepared to send five Chinook transport helicopters and three Blackhawk helicopters to Pakistan on Monday to help ferry relief supplies.
India, a longtime rival of Pakistan, offered help in a gesture of cooperation. The nuclear-armed neighbors have been pursuing peace after fighting three wars since independence from British rule in 1947, two of them over the Kashmir region.
Other international aid, including emergency rescue workers, began to flow in. Planes arrived from Turkey, Britain, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Russia, China and Germany also offered assistance.
Senior officials in Pakistan's portion of Kashmir put the death toll much higher. The top elected official in the region, Sardar Sikandar Hayat, said that more than 25,000 people had died there with “countless” injured. Tariq Mahmood, the province's communications minister, put the toll at over 30,000.
Troops “have not started relief work in remote villages where people are still buried in the rubble, and in some areas nobody is present to organize funerals for the dead,” Mahmood said.
The quake was felt across a wide swath of South Asia, with damage spanning at least 250 miles, from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to Srinagar in northern Indian territory.
On the Indian side of the militarized Kashmir border — where at least 800 have died — hundreds of Kashmiris spent Sunday night outside in the cold after rumors of another temblor. Hundreds of mosques announced warnings of a further quake over loudspeakers; none was reported.
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