Quake kills 15,000 in Iran

KERMAN, IRAN: More than 15,000 people were killed and up to 30,000 others injured yesterday in a devastating dawn quake in southeast Iran, and the government rushed to provide assistance to the thousands of homeless who were left without shelter in the winter cold. The Iranian government declared three days of mourning for what President Mohammad Khatami called a “national tragedy” in Bam, a city of 80,000 people. Mohammed Ali Karimi, the governor of Kerman province, told Khatami that preliminary estimates put the death toll at 15,000 to 16,000, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Iranian legislator Hasan Khoshrou told The Associated Press after speaking to officials on the scene that as many as 18,000 people could have died. IRNA said the quake was a 6.3-magnitude on the Richter scale; the US Geological Survey measured it at 6.5. Continuing aftershocks panicked survivors who were gathered on the streets. One early aftershock registered a magnitude of 5.3, according to the geophysics institute of Tehran University. Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari told Iranian television that 70 percent of residential Bam had been destroyed and there was no electricity, water or telephone lines. Earlier in the day, Iranian television showed entire neighbourhoods collapsed; in the old quarter of Bam hardly a building remained upright. In one street, only a wall and the trees were standing. People were shown carrying away the injured, while others sat sobbing next to the blanket-covered corpses of their loved ones. One man held his head in his hands and wailed.

At the city’s only cemetery, a crowd of about 1,000 people wailed and beat their chests and heads over some 500 corpses that lay on the ground. The dead were being buried in mass graves dug by a bulldozer. Mohammed Karimi, in his 30s, was at the cemetery with the bodies of his wife and four-year-old daughter. “Last night before she went to sleep she made me a drawing and kissed me four times,” he said of his daughter, Nazenine, whom he held in his arms. “When I asked, ‘Why four kisses,’ she said, ‘Maybe I won’t see you again, Papa,’ “Karimi recounted, as tears streamed down his face. “This is the day of resurrection. There is nothing but devastation and debris,” he told an AP photographer at the scene. Television reported at least 30,000 wounded, and said 90 percent of those were in critical condition. Because hospitals in the area had been destroyed, the government sent transport planes to evacuate the wounded for treatment elsewhere.