BOUDOUAOU, Algeria, 26 May 2003 — Rescuers raced against the clock yesterday to find an 11-year-old girl buried alive as Algeria’s earthquake death toll passed 2,000 and bulldozers moved in to clear bodies and debris.

The hunt for Sabrina in the rubble of a four-story building nearly four days after the quake ravaged the Algerian coast offered a glimmer of hope in what was otherwise a search no longer for the living, but for the dead.

“It’s just not possible to find people alive. Only the dead. It’s too late,” said Levente Szabo, a tired-looking trauma surgeon from Poland as he took a rest from salvage operations.

In earthquake-stricken cities, rescue teams and sniffer dogs stood aside as bulldozers and cranes ripped apart what was left of flattened buildings to uncover blackened and bloated bodies.

As the official toll rose to 2,047 dead and 8,626 injured in Wednesday night’s quake, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale, shock turned to anger against the authorities.

Survivors accused the government of turning a blind eye to shoddy construction in a quake-prone area and of standing by as the death toll mounted. Well over 1,000 people were missing and 51,000 homeless in the North African country’s most devastating quake in more than 20 years.

Thousands of residents of the Mediterranean provinces of Algiers and Boumerdes spent a fourth night in the open because they had lost their homes or were too scared to return to those still standing.

The shortage of tents forced many to put up makeshift shelters of carpets, blankets and anything else that remained.

Hundreds of buildings and dozens of schools and hospitals folded like packs of cards when the quake struck.

“The builders were corner-cutters. Poor construction to save money,” said a policeman as he watched a salvage operation in Boumerdes, a town where hundreds perished.

The anger was clear on Saturday when crowds chanted “assassin” at President Abdelaziz Bouteflika when he visited badly hit areas. Some threw stones at him and kicked his car.

Italian rescuers probed the building where Sabrina lived, in the coastal town of Boudouaou. “People said they heard a voice in the night. We heard nothing with our equipment,” said Piero Moscardini, a rescue team leader from Rome.

A dust-covered rescue worker shouted “Quiet!” at crowds pushing to watch a team gingerly push sophisticated sound equipment into the depths of the rubble.

“She was a happy, intelligent, good girl,” said her father, Mohamed Ben Mouman, 39, standing in the dust whipped up by the wind. “It’s been nearly five days. I don’t think we will find her alive,” he said, peering under sandwiched concrete blocks.

In a comic twist to the tragedy, a young looter escaped with his life but no booty after French rescuers pulled him from a building that collapsed in one of the scores of aftershocks. The man apparently entered the first story apartment in the damaged building in the early hours yesterday when an aftershock caused it to collapse.

He was trapped between four cement beams and French rescuers pulled him out from the rubble of the building some 12 hours after it collapsed.