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10,000 feared dead in Iran quake

A video grab image from IRIB Iranian Television shows a street scene following a devastating earthquake in Bam, Iran, on Friday. A powerful earthquake struck the ancient Silk Road city of Bam in southeastern Iran on Friday, killing 'thousands' and razing many buildings, state television said. — Reuters photo

Teheran, December 26
A powerful earthquake rocked the southeastern Iranian city of Bam, killing possibly 10,000 persons.

Iranian legislator Hasan Khoshrou said, after speaking to officials on the scene, that 10,000 persons might have died in the earthquake, describing the devastation as “beyond imagination”.

Mr Khoshrou said a survey undertaken by a helicopter indicated that over 60 per cent of Bam’s houses had been destroyed.

The earthquake of magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale hit Bam, a city of 80,000 persons, at 5.28 am (07.28 IST), state television reported. Its epicentre was outside Bam, about 1,000 km southeast of Teheran.

“The quake hit the city when most of the people were in bed, raising fears that the death toll may go higher,” he said. He is one of the province’s representatives in Parliament.

The Governor of the Kerman province, Mohammad Ali Karimi, said: “The death toll is very high”. “Many people are buried under the rubble”.

Hardly any buildings in Iran are built to withstand earthquakes, although the country sits on several major faultlines and temblors are frequent.

Iran’s Red Crescent, the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross, said rescue and relief teams had been sent to Bam from numerous provinces, including Teheran.

“We are doing everything we can to rescue the injured and unearth the dead,” the television quoted Mr Karimi as saying.

Relief teams set up their headquarters in a public square in Bam because their offices in the Governor’s building had been ruined, he told state radio.

The citadel of Bam was destroyed. The oldest part of the fortress dates to about 2,000 years ago, but most of it was built in the 15th to 18th centuries and attracted thousands of tourists every year.

GENEVA: The United Nations and several countries, including Russia and Germany, on Friday offered help to victims of a devastating earthquake in Iran.

United Nations officials said they were releasing an immediate emergency grant of $ 90,000 to help Iran in handling the aftermath of the quake, adding that a team of experts had been sent to help assess the damage. — AP, Reuters