Earthquake death toll at 20,000

BALAKOT, Pakistan -- President Pervez Musharraf pleaded for international help yesterday to hurry rescue equipment and relief supplies to tens of thousands of earthquake victims in Pakistan, while desperate survivors begged for government help that still had not arrived in large areas of the quake zone.

As the confirmed death toll climbed to 20,000, Musharraf asked the United States, Britain, and other international donors to send heavy-lift helicopters, financial aid, medical supplies, and tents following the magnitude 7.6 temblor that hit on Saturday. The Pentagon promised delivery today of eight military choppers from Afghanistan.

The helicopters, needed in part to get heavy equipment to rescuers now working with little more than hand tools, may be too late for hundreds of children trapped in numerous collapsed schools across northern Pakistan. The quake struck just after 8:50 a.m. Saturday as students were preparing for classes to begin.

At the ruins of the Shaheen Private School in the devastated northwestern town of Balakot, survivors exhausted from hours of trying to unearth students by hand listened helplessly yesterday as trapped children pleaded for rescue and struggled to survive under the rubble.

Residents waited amid corpses covered by battered sheets of corrugated tin roofing and complained bitterly about the lack of outside help.

''They are alive, but we do not have the expertise to get them out," said a dejected woman sitting on the school's roof, which lay across the rubble of walls shattered by the violent quake.

One resident said a child under the rubble had called out his own name, Khizer, for two hours. Then there was silence.

Residents feared that hundreds more children were trapped in the debris of Shaheen and two other schools in Balakot, which was flattened by the quake's force.

Several people in the town, about 70 miles north of Islamabad, the capital, cursed the government for not reaching the trapped people of Balakot in time to save more lives.

''All we could see for the whole day is just two military helicopters," said Sajid Hussain, a local resident. ''We whistled and waved to them, but they vanished."

The bodies of at least 400 children were recovered from two other destroyed schools in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, where Balakot is located. Rescuers were also able to pull dozens of children out alive from some of the collapsed schools.

Two days after the quake, the full scale of the disaster was slowly unfolding as military rescue and relief teams in Pakistan and India struggled to overcome bad weather, avalanches, cracked roads and bridges, and towering mountains to reach devastated areas.

Across the earthquake zone yesterday, ruined towns and damaged roads slowed the rescue efforts and marked the new reality of life for tens of thousands of survivors. Hundreds of thousands of people spent a chilly night under the open skies because their homes were damaged or they feared deadly aftershocks. Severe shortages of food and water were reported.

''Affected people have no shelter, no drinking water, no first aid, and aid agencies have yet to start activities," said Najeeb Ahmad, who has worked with relief organizations in the town of Abbottabad, about 35 miles south of Balakot. ''I slept in my car because of the continuous aftershocks."

The regional Ayub Medical Complex in Abbottabad was inundated with an estimated 1,000 patients as doctors treated the injured in hospital's outdoor compound.

By Sunday afternoon, the confirmed toll in Pakistan was at least 19,136 dead and 42,397 injured, Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao told reporters.

''It is such a horrendous situation that one cannot imagine," he said. ''Casualties are increasing by the hour."

At least 465 people also died in India and four in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported. The United Nations has estimated that some 2.5 million people need shelter due to extensive damage caused by the quake.

President Bush yesterday invited the ranking Pakistani diplomat to the White House and spoke on the telephone with Musharraf, assuring him of US support.

''I expressed our nation's deepest condolences," Bush said of his conversation with the Pakistani president. ''And I told him that we want to help in any way we can. To that end, we've already started to send cash money and other equipment and goods that is going to be needed to help the people in Pakistan."

The statements came after Musharraf's plea for international help, which singled out the United States and Britain as having transport helicopters big enough to lift heavy equipment into vast, mountainous areas cut off by the quake.

''We can only go by roads, and roads also don't reach to every corner, so therefore it's only helicopter access that we have," Pakistan's president said during an interview with reporters in Rawalpindi, a suburb of the capital, Islamabad. ''Things are not as simple as one would see in the West."

''We have enough manpower, but we need financial support so that we may utilize it in a required way to cope with the tragedy," the Pakistani leader said.

Musharraf, an army general who seized power in a 1999 coup, ordered the armed forces to lead the rescue and relief effort just hours after the earthquake struck.

The disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan both claim sovereignty, was one of the regions hardest hit by the temblor. The epicenter was near Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, where scores of buildings were destroyed and hundreds of people were killed.

The earthquake's epicenter was in the Hindu Kush mountain range of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, where some villages are more than 10,000 feet above sea level.

Across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir, the quake was so powerful in the Indian-controlled zone that there was a roaring sound and Bashir Hussain Shah thought his village, around 120 miles south of Srinagar, had come under artillery fire from Pakistani troops. His three-story house collapsed and Shah's 13-year-old son Tahir was missing, somewhere on the path he walked each day through a mountain valley on his way to his seventh-grade class.

Relatives found the teen hours later, with a fractured leg, shattered jaw, and smashed teeth. He was lying unconscious beneath a pile of rocks.