At least 229 people have died in a powerful earthquake which shook northern Morocco earlier today, officials said, warning the death toll was likely to rise.
Villages around the Mediterranean port city of Al Hoceima were badly damaged, people were still buried under the rubble of collapsed mud-brick homes and the local hospital was too small to cope with the scale of the disaster, they said.
Morocco quake scene
In the village of Im-Zouren, 18 km (11 miles) to the south, many houses were flattened like cardboard boxes. Frightened residents roamed the streets littered with debris.
"Many people are still trapped under the rubble, we have no equipment," Mr Hassan Hmidouch, head of the town council, told Reuters Television. "It's a total disaster, the world needs to help us".
"We don't have sniffer dogs or any equipment to lift or cut iron bars," he earlier told 2M state television.
Television footage showed an old man using a pocket knife to cut through a blanket that appeared to cover a body.
Morocco's MAP state news agency put the provisional death toll at 229 with 120 injured in the worst quake to rock the North African country in more than 40 years. Of the total, 164 died in Im-Zouren.
In Al Hoceima, local authorities struggled to cope with hundreds of victims.
Ms Josephine Shields, North African delegate for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Tunis, said six villages within 15 km (10 miles) of Al Hoceima had been hit, in particular Ait Kamara.
"Ait Kamara has been reported to be totally destroyed. We've been told that the entire affected area has between 300,000 and 400,000 people. It is a remote area, very mountainous, so it is a bit difficult to access."
She said victims needed blankets, warm clothing, food and water. "There is possibly a need for a field hospital as local health facilities are basically saturated," she added.
An Interior Ministry official in Al Hoceima said heavy equipment was badly needed in order to clear the rubble and search for survivors. But he warned access would be difficult on the narrow roads snaking at the foothills of the Rif mountains.
A civil defence spokesman in Al Hoceima said there were many dead in Ait Kamara where most houses, like in Im-Zouren, were built of mud bricks and collapsed under the force of the tremor.
A local member of parliament, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters: "The number of people killed could easily reach 300. Rescuers have only managed to dig out about 10 percent of the number of people believed to be buried under the rubble" in villages around Al Hoceima.