IRAN: Government officials in Iran warned yesterday that the number of people who perished in Bam could reach 50,000, the highest toll from any earthquake for more than 25 years.
The new estimate, which is sharply higher than the government's previous figure of nearly 30,000 dead, would represent a quarter of the population of Bam and the surrounding areas.
More than 28,000 victims have already been buried, the interior ministry said yesterday.
"If we consider that on average five people lived in each house we can say the death toll will reach 50,000," one official told Reuters.
The Iranian president, Mr Mohammad Khatami, played down the new estimate but aid workers said it might not be wide of the mark.
"It normally takes two or three months for government to confirm the total figure in these cases," said Mr Ted Pearn, chief of the UN coordination agency in Bam. "On the other hand, they've come out with alarming figures before and been proved right." Around 80 per cent of the mud-brick city has crumbled to shapeless dusty mounds. The stench of rotting bodies still hangs heavy over it.
Little is yet known about the scale of destruction outside the city. But a tour of the surrounding villages revealed a grisly picture yesterday.
Every village within a couple of miles north, west and east of Bam had been levelled. Even eight miles outside the city, houses were destroyed and villagers were in mourning.
In Sfikan, five miles east of Bam, two old men with calloused hands stood sobbing by the rubble of their adjoining homes.
Mr Akbar Malbubi (72) lost his wife and five of his eight children when the heavy mud-brick roof caved in. His brother Mohammed (74) lost his wife and only daughter. Another brother, a sister, and most of their children perished nearby. "I am an old man and I have lost my family. I ask God to kill me!" sobbed Akbar, raising his hands to the sky yesterday.
"Every house here has been destroyed, every family has lost three, four, five people," Mohammed said. "Our wells and irrigation channels have collapsed, so even our date trees may die." The brothers were being sheltered in tents and provided with food by the Iranian Red Crescent, as were thousands of destitute people outside Bam.
Ms Naire Bolokar (27) a woman in Zeizabad, nine miles west of the city, said she had also been given medicine. "We are being looked after with food and tents, thank God," she said.
"Even if we have nothing and most of our relatives are dead." In Poshtrud, six miles east of Bam, a crowd of women in black robes were lamenting outside the ruined mosque. "Do you remember how my son and your son used to play together?" one woman cried to another.
Inside the mosque, a Red Crescent team from Ghazvin province, 1,000 miles north-west of Bam, was arranging food stores and operating an emergency clinic. The team of volunteers, including six doctors, arrived in Postrud late on St Stephen's Day, within 12 hours of the earthquake, according to their boss, Mr Hechmat Hashemi.
Around one-third of Poshtrud's population were dead, and another third injured, said Mr Hashemi. "The situation is very serious and we need foreign help, but we are meeting the emergency needs." The Red Crescent had distributed nearly 90,000 tents in and around Bam yesterday, though many townspeople remained huddled outside, on roundabouts and verges, as the temperature dropped below zero late yesterday. Most of the international rescue teams in Bam were expected to leave tomorrow, having failed to salvage any survivors from the city's suffocating rubble.
Extraordinary rescue stories ran rife through Bam and the surrounding villages, but few were officially confirmed, and Mr Pearn suggested that they might owe more to hope than to reality.
"We've had over 30 professional international teams operating here with dogs and they've found no one alive. But if these reports help some people think the situation's not entirely hopeless, so be it," he said.