At least 170 dead as quake hits Pakistan

October 30, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

WAM, Pakistan (AP) — Desperate villagers clawed through piles of mud and timber looking for victims of an earthquake that collapsed thousands of homes in southwestern Pakistan before dawn Wednesday, killing at least 170 people.

Army planes began flying in tents, medical supplies and blankets to the quake zone in Baluchistan province, but some 15,000 homeless people in the impoverished region faced a night in the open in near freezing temperatures following the 6.4-magnitude jolt.

“I have lost everything,” said Haji Shahbaz, mourning the deaths of 17 relatives in Wam, a hard-hit village. “Nothing is left here, and now life is worthless for me,” he added, then wailed in despair, tears streaking his dust-caked face.

Pakistan is no stranger to natural disasters, but the quake comes at an especially precarious time for the Muslim country, with the civilian government battling al-Qaida and Taliban attacks while grappling with a punishing economic crisis.

As the army and other government agencies rushed to provide help, at least three hard-line Islamic organizations also were quick to aid quake survivors, according to an Associated Press reporter who toured the area.

Among them was Jamaat-ud-Dawa, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government for its links to Muslim separatists fighting in India’s portion of the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

The group set up relief camps and won friends among survivors of a 7.6-magnitude quake that devastated Kashmir and northern Pakistan in October 2005, killing about 80,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Baluchistan is home to a long-running separatist movement, but has so far been spared the level of militant violence seen in the northwestern tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, where Muslim extremists are strong.

Wednesday’s quake hit before sunrise as most people slept. Witnesses reported two strong jolts about an hour apart, saying the second at 5:10 a.m. caused the destruction, collapsing the flimsy mud-brick and timber houses common to this poor region.

The worst-hit area was the Ziarat valley, where hundreds of houses were destroyed in at least eight villages, including some buried in landslides triggered by the quake.

Dilawar Kakar, mayor of the hilltop town of Ziarat, said 170 people in the area had been killed, with 375 injured and around 15,000 left homeless. Ziarat itself, a popular summer resort since the days of the British empire, was spared major damage.

In the village of Sohi, a reporter for AP Television News saw the bodies of 17 people killed in one collapsed house and 12 from another. Distraught residents were digging a mass grave.