Islamabad: Flood-ravaged Pakistan said it has received international aid of $300 million but the flow of money remained slow, and survivors lashed out at Islamabad for failing to move faster to help.
Nearly half the $459 million needed for initial relief in Pakistan's worst ever floods has been secured after days of lobbying donors and warnings that the country faces a spiralling humanitarian catastrophe, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
"There has been an improvement in funding. Donors are realising the scale of the disaster," UN spokesman Maurizio Giuliano told media. "But the challenges are absolutely massive and the floods are not over."
Zamir Akram, Pakistan's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said the country had received more immediate multilateral relief aid through the UN and direct bilateral aid totalling about $301 million.
Meanwhile, US military aviation assets and personnel rescued 800 people in Pakistan, bringing the total of flood victims rescued to 4,403, the government said.
Church World Service had handed out 70 tons of food items for households in Balochistan and Khyber Pakthunkhwa provinces, and was in the process of buying another 630 tons of food, it said. An additional 700 tons of food is to be handed out in the next month, it said.
Pakistan on Wednesday also reassured international donors that aid for flood victims would not fall into Taliban hands.
Donors are nervous, but Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, vowed that the Taliban would profit from donations.
"This belongs to the poor people, the flood victims. I assure that it will travel to them," he told the BBC.
Meanwhile, militants attacked police posts in Pakistan's northwest and killed two civilians active in an anti-Taliban militia, challenging a security establishment straining under a national flooding disaster, police said Wednesday.
A group of militants first killed two members of a militia in the Adezai area of Peshawar as they headed to pray at a mosque late Tuesday, said Liaqat Ali Khan, Peshawar police chief.
In the hours after, dozens of militants from the Khyber tribal region, which lies near Peshawar and along the Afghan border, attacked police posts in the Sarband area of Peshawar. The two sides exchanged fire for about an hour before the militants retreated to Khyber, Khan said.
He said several militants were killed, but there were no police casualties.
The clashes suggest insurgents are not abandoning their campaign against the state despite the flooding that has affected some 20 million people - or one in nine Pakistanis.
"As the police force is busy in rescue and relief work for flood affectees, militants tried to take advantage of the situation to attack Peshawar, but the police force was fully alert and vigilant," Khan said.
Torrential monsoon rain triggered catastrophic floods which have affected 20 million people in three weeks, wiping out villages, farmland, infrastructure and killing at least 1,400 people in the nation's worst natural disaster.
