Child rescue brings gleam of joy in quake misery

Soldiers pulled a young girl alive from the rubble of the Kashmir earthquake yesterday, giving shattered Pakistan a moment of joy on a day when storms poured more misery on a million homeless survivors.

After a night exposed to solid rain under the flimsiest of shelters, many survivors waited in vain for help as the weather grounded all but a few of a growing fleet of relief helicopters eight days after the quake pulverised a wide region.

A day after an army helicopter crash killed all six on board on Saturday, a reminder of the dangers of mountain flights in bad weather, only half a dozen or so helicopters took off.

They are the only way to get supplies deep into mountains of Pakistani Kashmir and adjoining North West Frontier Province where the quake buckled roads or buried them in landslides.

"Many people are out without shelter," said Robert Holden, operations manager of the UN relief effort, as the government raised its confirmed death toll to 39,422, with at least 65,000 people injured, on a par with a quake that almost destroyed the city of Quetta in 1935. Another 1,300 people died on the Indian side of the border.

But a story to lift the spirits came in the form of a nine-year-old boy at Snaghar, around seven kilometres from Balakot, the worst-hit city in North West Frontier Province.

Military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan said the boy, who had looked after his two younger brothers, one a babe in arms, since their parents were killed in the October 8 quake, told soldiers he had found his sister alive and begged for help.