Earthquake: body count on the rise
IRAN/IRAQ BORDER: HUNDREDS DEAD, NEARLY 4 000 HURT
Many families spent night outdoors as properties are razed.
Apowerful earthquake that rocked a border region between Iran and Iraq has left at least 344 people dead, according to Iranian and Iraqi authorities, with further casualties expected as rescuers work to recover survivors from the rubble.
Iran’s interior ministry reported 336 dead and 3 950 people injured.
The Iranian provinces of Kermanshah and Illam were reported to be the worst hit in the quake, which struck late on Sunday.
Eight people were killed and 535 injured in northern Iraq, health ministry spokesperson Saif al-Badr said.
Seven of those killed in Iraq were in the northern region of Kurdistan and one was killed in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province, he added.
The earthquake’s epicentre was in a remote mountainous region of Iraq, about 200km northeast of Baghdad and 400km west of Tehran, according to the US Geological Survey.
Many families spent the night outdoors, after repeated aftershocks yesterday.
It took emergency services in Kermanshah eight hours before they could begin their rescue mission when day broke yesterday.
Once work began to recover the victims, the death toll ticked up. The number of wounded also rose dramatically.
Witnesses said hospitals in the province were overwhelmed by the casualties.
The health ministry in Tehran said it had sent doctors to the affected region. Victims with serious injuries were being sent to the Iranian capital for treatment.
In Iraq, local authorities in the Kurdish cities of Sulaimaniya and Halabja gave employees the day off yesterday, after hundreds of houses were destroyed across the region. Most of the houses damaged were in Kurdistan’s eastern town of Darbandikhan, where four people have died.
The first aid convoy from the Turkish Red Crescent arrived in Iraq’s Kurdish region yesterday.
In 1990, a 7.4-magnitude quake in Rudbar of Iran’s northern Gilan province claimed 35 000 lives. Another major seismic event in Bam in south-eastern Iran left 26 000 dead in 2003.
Seismologists say the Arabian tectonic plate was responsible for the earthquake as it shifts upwards and on to the Eurasian plate.
“The region is tectonically speaking very complex and active, with various tectonic plates moving against each other,” said Professor Marco Bohnhoff of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. – dpa