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Haiti death toll likely to cross 200,000
UN says this is worst disaster the agency has ever confronted
- Agencies
- Published: 21:19 January 16, 2010
- Image Credit: AP
- A woman cries as she watches the body of her husband being dumped from a front loader into a truck as crews remove bodies from the streets in the aftermath of Tuesday's earthquake
Port-au-Prince: Tensions rose among desperate Haitians awaiting international aid and hunting for missing relatives on Saturday as aid began to trickle in four days after an earthquake that Haitian authorities say killed 200,000 people.
Haiti's government gave the US control over its main airport to bring order to aid and food flights from around the world and speed relief.
Trucks piled with corpses have been carrying bodies to hurriedly excavated mass graves, but thousands of bodies still are believed buried.
"We have already collected around 50,000 dead bodies," Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime told Reuters. "We anticipate there will be between 100,000 and 200,000 dead in total, although we will never know the exact number."
The earthquake in Haiti is the worst disaster ever confronted by the United Nations, a spokeswoman said.
"This is a historic disaster. We have never been confronted with such a disaster in the UN memory. It is like no other," Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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