Trapped children cry out for parents

By Zahid Hussein in Balakot and Izhar Wani in Jabla,
PakistanOctober 10, 2005

With hands, picks and shovels, desperate parents struggled to reach more than 850 children trapped in the rubble of two schools flattened by Saturday morning's massive earthquake in northern Pakistan.

The voices of trapped children and the anguished wails of their parents accompanied the frantic work yesterday in the Balakot valley in the mountains of North West Frontier Province, one of the areas worst hit. Pakistan has called for three days of mourning.

"Save me, call my mother, call my father," came the faint voice of a boy, again and again, from the rubble of a government school in which local people said about 200 children were trapped.

"Bring out my child, bring out my child," his mother wailed, beating her chest as other parents and relatives pulled out the bodies of four children, bringing the morning's toll to eight.

A day after the quake hit Balakot, police and emergency services were nowhere in sight, but residents of the town of about 20,000 people estimated 2500 may have been killed there and in seven surrounding mountain villages. Thousands were injured, mostly women and children who were in their homes at the time of the disaster while their men worked in the open.

A spokesman for President Pervez Musharraf said 18,000 people had been killed in the north by the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that jolted Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. About 30,000 people have been killed in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir alone, the region's Minister for Works and Communication, Tariq Farooq, said yesterday.

Rescuers pulled two survivors from the ruins of an apartment complex in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, yesterday. General Musharraf said 35 bodies had been recovered from the ruins of the Margala Towers - the only buildings to collapse in the capital. Eighty people had already been rescued and about 150 were still trapped yesterday.

At the private Shaheen School in the Balakot valley, another 650 children were trapped inside the four-storey building that collapsed as the children sat in class at 8.50am on Saturday.

Parents scrambling through the rubble said they had brought out six dead children and 19 injured. The bodies of four children could be seen on the school roof.

The Balakot region was a scene of devastation. Perhaps half of the concrete houses had collapsed and dozens of bodies lay in the open. Residents complained about the lack of help. The road into town had been blocked by landslides, and it was only possible to reach it on foot.

There was also no government help in Jabla, an isolated village in Indian Kashmir. Sixteen-year-old Tauseef Ahmed managed to escape from his collapsing house when the quake struck, but could only watch helplessly as his father disappeared under the falling debris. "My father pushed all of us out hurriedly, but he couldn't make it himself," he sobbed.

Jabla straddled the ridges of a pine-tree covered mountain close to the de facto border dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan. About 1300 people lived there in 300 tin-roofed homes made of brick, mud and stone. The entire village was flattened.

The villagers were still waiting for aid yesterday afternoon. "We slept in the open fields last night. There were no tents, no food," said Shahnaz Banu, 13. Residents said they had pulled two dozen dead from the rubble, sent many more to hospitals and were still digging for "many missing".

All along the zigzagging route to Jabla, 110 kilometres north of Indian Kashmir's summer capital Srinagar, were scores of collapsed houses. The quake also killed at least 320 Indians.

The locals - mostly farmers harvesting maize, rice and walnuts - were rummaging through the ruins trying to salvage some of their belongings.

"My entire house is gone. Nothing is left, not even a single room where I could shelter my family," said Abdul Aziz, 43, from neighbouring Garkote village.

Reuters, Agence France-Presse

Link Here