A day after a powerful quake hit northern Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said on Tuesday that more than 300 people had been killed in both countries, while warning that a complete picture of the damage in remote areas isolated by hard terrain and an active insurgency could take days to emerge. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province alone, authorities said at least 179 people were known to have died, and more than 1,800 were injured. Upon arrival he summoned a meeting to discuss relief efforts in the aftermath of the quake.
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Search and rescue personnel are struggling to make it to areas rattled by this week’s deadly 7.5-magnitude quake which hit the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan.
Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) personnel, he said, cleared 27 of the 45 landslides that blocked the Karakoram Highway (KKH).
Rescuers and the Pakistan military are now in a race against time to reach victims stranded in remote regions before the freezing weather conditions claim more lives.
That quake was much shallower – 10 kilometres (6 miles) below the surface of the earth, compared to the depth of 213 kilometres (130 miles) on Monday – and thus caused greater damage, said Mohammad Hanif, an official at the Meteorological Department.
“There was rain yesterday and no one came to help us”, said Jamil Khan, a 24-year-old in Shangla, one of the worst-hit districts of Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. Thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged.
“Many villages in normal circumstances are one or two hours from proper roads”, said Arif Noor, the Pakistan director for the aid group Mercy Corps, CNN reported. A C-130 aircraft was on its way to Chitral with seven tonnes of ration, 2,500 ready-to-eat meals, medical teams, 1000 tents and blankets to be distributed in remote areas, the spokesman said.
A few victims were interviewed and they said food has been scarce. On record, 9,000 people were killed, and roughly 900,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.
In his message of condolence to President Mamnnon Hussain, Xi said that China and Pakistan are all-weather strategic partners of cooperation and the Chinese people also feel the pains of the Pakistani people in the face of the disaster.
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Among those killed by the quake were 12 school girls who, according to OCHA, were crushed in a stampede as they fled their collapsing school.
