Aftershock Rattles Quake Victims

A fire Sunday at a tent for homeless victims of South Asia's massive earthquake injured four children and a severe aftershock rattled northern Pakistan, unleashing new landslides and panicking survivors.

Pakistan and India, in a breakthrough accord, geared up for a partial opening starting Monday of their disputed frontier in the hard-hit region of Kashmir to ease the flow of aid to survivors, but Pakistan and Indian both acknowledged over the weekend that plans to open five crossings, had to be sharply curtailed.

Aid workers, meanwhile, raced against the snowfall expected in coming days to help hundreds of thousands of survivors still without shelter nearly a month after the Oct. 8 quake.

Doctors stepped up inoculations against diseases expected to spread in the close quarters of tent camps and add to the quake's death toll of about 80,000.

"My fear is that we may lose thousands of lives in the winter," said Dr. Jehanzed Khan Aurakzai, a coordinator for Pakistan's Health Ministry.

The blaze at a tent in the northwestern town of Balakot highlighted an additional danger of tent life, cooking fires, and Pakistan army Lt. Col. Saeed Iqbal urged displaced residents to do their cooking outside.

"They have bedding and clothes inside their tents which can catch fire easily," he said.

The fire seriously injured a 3-year-old girl and also injured three of her siblings, he said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injury from Sunday's 6.0 temblor, centered in Pakistan's portion of Kashmir, but it was one of the biggest aftershocks of the original 7.6-magnitude quake, seismologists in the northwestern city of Peshawar said.

Sunday's jolt unleashed landslides throughout the Kaghan valley, including some that temporarily blocked traffic in the Balakot area, said Ali Hassan of the Pakistani agency in charge of road-clearing.

Mohammed Rafeek, staying in a tent camp on the outskirts of Balakot, said the latest aftershock was felt strongly in the area early Sunday.

"Some people screamed. We all ran outside. No one is taking chances anymore," he said.

Most of the people killed in the quake were in Pakistani territory but 1,350 were in India's portion of divided Kashmir.

The U.N. estimates that 800,000 people are without shelter in the quake zone, 200,000 of them in remote, mostly high-altitude hamlets that haven't yet received help, and aid agencies are struggling against dwindling budgets and blocked roads to distribute help.

Cuban President Fidel Castro called Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to express solidarity and offer to send an additional 200 Cuban doctors to the quake zone, to join 87 already there, state-run Pakistan Television reported Sunday.

It is unlikely any civilians will be allowed to cross the Kashmir frontier between India and Pakistan on schedule because of procedural glitches, the Pakistan Foreign Ministry said Sunday, a day ahead of the much-anticipated opening.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam told The Associated Press that neither country had sent each other lists of those people approved to cross over.

"It doesn't look likely. We have not yet received any list from India and our list has not gone to India," she said, adding that she hoped the paperwork would be exchanged on Monday. Each country would then have as long as 10 days to process the names, though they could theoretically do it faster.

Aslam said relief goods to help quake victims on either side of divided Kashmir were expected to be allowed to go through.

Kashmir was split between India and Pakistan after the bloody partition of the subcontinent following independence from Britain in 1947. Both countries claim all of Kashmir in a dispute that has sparked two wars and kept families separated for more than half a century.