BORA, Iran, 28 December 2003 — Rescue teams were swamped yesterday by the huge numbers of corpses being pulled out of the rubble after Iran’s devastating earthquake, as dozens of Iranian military aircraft were mobilized to evacuate the wounded.
An AFP journalist at the scene said cars and trucks loaded with piles of bodies were flowing into the cemetery of the stricken town of Bora, southeast of Bam. Many corpses were abandoned in a corner of the cemetery, with grave-diggers overwhelmed by the rush.
A father was seen carrying his two children, aged three and seven, ready to bury them with their clothes still on, without having first washed the bodies in keeping with Islamic customs.
Friday’s quake which hit southeast Iran left more than 20,000 people dead and 30,000 injured, according to a provisional toll issued by the Interior Ministry, Iranian state television reported. But the toll is expected to rise much higher, Interior Minister Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari said.
Several aircraft ferried in hundreds of wounded from Bam to the capital’s airport, from where they were being transferred with the help of soldiers to a fleet of ambulances headed for Tehran hospitals.
Natives of Bam, meanwhile, were frantically trying to find seats on any flights bound for the region to search for relatives. Swiss rescue teams arrived early yesterday in Kerman with more dogs and were to continue immediately to Bam. The temperature dropped to below freezing overnight in Bam, making it unlikely that survivors would still be found in the ruins.
The first planes bringing foreign rescuers to help Iran arrived early yesterday in Kerman, the local provincial governor’s office said, quoted by IRNA. Apart from Switzerland, the planes were also from Britain, Germany and Russia, it said.
“So far there are Swiss teams, Germans, Turks, some British,” said Heiner Gloor, of Swiss Rescue, who is coordinating international relief efforts on the ground in southeastern Iran.
“They are starting to come in regularly now and that’s good because the Iranians need all the help they can get,” said Gloor. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It is a picture of total devastation. It is a huge area which has been hit. For the moment the focus is on Bam but there are outlying villages which we still haven’t got to.”
