No hope for quake victims in Samangan

A UN official said yesterday there was almost no hope of finding survivors in a northern Afghan village crushed by massive landslides after last weekend's powerful earthquake.

More than 100 people are believed to have died in the village in Samangan province and only about 10 bodies have so far been recovered, said Alejandro Chicheri, information officer for the World Food Programme (WFP). Most of the dead had been found in a river.

Chicheri said at least 100 houses were buried under about eight metres of debris and there was a lack of equipment to dig for survivors.

"The problem is the amount of rubble on top of the houses is massive and it will take weeks or months to clear," he told Reuters from the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, about 130 km northwest of the village in Sarbakh Dakhi valley.

Asked if there was any chance of survivors, he said: "You never lose hope but the chances are not good."

Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai and Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Secretary-General's special representative for Afghanistan, visited the village on Wednesday to offer condolences to victims.

Two sections of a limestone cliff sheared off after the 7.2 magnitude earthquake on Sunday, flattening a part of the village and blocking the Samangan river that runs through the valley.

Aid workers are now trying to cut a channel through the wall of debris blocking the river, which has become a lake 200 metres wide and 800 metres long and is flooding many of the homes that survived the landslide.

Pumps are also been used to drain the lake. Thousands of people and their livestock downstream depend on the river, adding to the urgency in restoring the flow.

Caroline Douilliez, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kabul, said there were scattered reports of casualties and damage from other northern provinces but she believed the village in Samangan was the area worst affected by the quake.