MUZAFFARABAD, 22 March 2007 — Relentless rain triggered landslides and roof collapses across northern Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir, leaving at least 67 people dead, officials and reports said yesterday.
At least 37 survivors of the devastating 2005 earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir were killed when two mudslides swept away their mountainside homes, police spokesman Javed Ahmed told AFP in the regional capital Muzaffarabad.
Twenty-seven people, most of them women, died and 16 were injured when a huge landslide hit Doba Syedan village in Kashmir’s Jhelum Valley area late Tuesday, police spokesman Javed Ahmed told AFP.
Another 10 were killed in a separate landslip at Jabar Daray village in the mountainous Bagh district on Tuesday, Ahmed said.
“It has been raining here for two days and the landslides happened almost simultaneously. These people were in houses built on terraces on the hillsides and huge landslides buried them,” Ahmed said.
“Police and army teams are in the area trying to remove the debris and recover the bodies. So far two bodies have been recovered in the Jhelum Valley. Efforts are being made to recover the others.” Ahmed added: “It’s very unfortunate. These are the people who were worst hit in the earthquake.” The 7.6-magnitude quake in October 2005 claimed more than 73,000 lives and left 3.3 million homeless in Pakistani Kashmir and northwestern Pakistan. More than 1,000 also died in Indian Kashmir.
Authorities later shifted around 55 families to safer places and gave them tents and rations after landslides damaged dozens of homes in the Tariqabad area adjoining Muzaffarabad, district chief Syed Zahoor Gilani said. Landslides and avalanches were also reported in North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, and press reports said the nationwide toll excluding Kashmir stood at more than 30.
Five members of a family were buried alive when an avalanche hit their home in mountainous Swat district on Tuesday, the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan said. Five more died when their roof caved in in the same district.
