Earthquake Death Toll Rising Fast

Bodies lay in the streets and villagers pulled debris from collapsed schools and mud-brick homes with their bare hands on Sunday, desperate to find survivors from a huge earthquake that struck Pakistan and India, killing about 19,500 people.

Interior minister Aftab Khan Sherpao said 19,136 people died and 42,397 were injured in Saturday's quake in northwestern Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Of the deaths, 17,388 were reported in Kashmir, he said.

The worst-hit city in Pakistani Kashmir was its capital, Muzaffarabad, where 11,000 died, Sherpao said.

India reported 360 killed and 900 injured.

Pakistan's private Aaj television reported a death toll of more than 25,000 in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and northwest Pakistan. It did not cite a source. Officials had said the toll will rise.

The magnitude 7.6 quake in the mountainous Kashmir region flattened dozens of villages, killing farmers, homemakers, soldiers and school children, and triggered landslides that blocked rescuers from reaching many devastated areas.

The quake was felt over a wide swath of South Asia, from central Afghanistan to western districts of Bangladesh. The damage zone was clustered around the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir, with damaged buildings spanning at least 250 miles from Jalalabad in Afghanistan to Srinagar in northern Indian territory.

Pakistani officials reported a magnitude 6 aftershock in parts of Pakistan Sunday afternoon. No casualties from the aftershock were reported.

Sultan said the death toll in Pakistan was expected to rise, and that authorities there had confirmed the toll so far by counting bodies. Some 215 Pakistani soldiers were among the dead, and 414 soldiers were injured, he said.

"We are handling the worst disaster in Pakistan's history," Sultan said.

The earthquake, which struck just before 9 a.m., caused buildings to sway for about a minute in the capitals of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, an area some 625 miles across. Panicked people ran from homes and offices, and communications were cut to many areas. Aftershocks rattled the region for hours afterwards, and hospitals moved quake victims onto lawns, fearing tremors could cause more damage.

CBS News correspondent Barry Petersen reports that many of the region's buildings are structurally unable to withstand a massive earthquake. In rural areas, homes can be little more than mud, bricks and wood — cheap to build, but quick to collapse.

On Sunday, Pakistani military helicopters ferried troops and supplies to some areas, but there was no sign of government help in Balakot, a northern village of 30,000 where the quake leveled the main bazaar, crushing shoppers and sending gas cylinders, bricks, tomatoes, onions and other produce spilling into the streets.

Petersen reports that some parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan are under the control of tribal militias, who may reject — at the point of a gun — any government efforts to send in the military as part of a rescue effort.

Injured people covered by shawls lay in the street, waiting for medical care. Residents carried bodies on wooden planks. The bodies of four children, aged between four and six years old, lay under a sheet of corrugated iron. Relatives said they were trying to find sheets to wrap the bodies.

"We don't have anything to bury them with," said a cousin, Saqib Swati.

Nearby, Faizan Farooq, a 19-year-old business administration student, stood outside the rubble of his four-story school, where at least 250 pupils were feared trapped. Dozens of villagers, some with sledgehammers but many without any tools, pulled at the debris and carried away bodies.

Farooq said that he could hear children under the rubble crying for help immediately after the disaster.

"Now there's no sign of life," he said. "We can't do this without the army's help. Nobody has come here to help us."

A 40-year-old man at the scene wept. He said four of his children were buried in the debris.

Elsewhere in Balakot, shopowner Mohammed Iqbal said two primary schools, one for boys and one for girls, also collapsed. He estimated that more than 500 students were feared dead.

A snow-covered mountain overlooks Balakot, which lies 60 miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Pine trees cover the hills surrounding the town, which lies on a route leading to scenic hill resorts.

The Pakistani military sent 25 helicopters with troops and medical supplies to quake-hit areas in Pakistani Kashmir and northwestern Pakistan to help survivors, Sultan said.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported 22 aftershocks in the 24 hours after the quake, including a 6.2-magnitude temblor.

India's government offered condolences and assistance to Pakistan, a longtime rival with which it has been pursuing peace after fighting three wars since independence from British rule in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

India initially reported at least 340 people killed and 850 injured when the quake collapsed 2,700 houses and other buildings in Jammu-Kashmir state. Most of the deaths occurred in the border towns of Uri, Tangdar and Punch and in the city of Srinagar, said B.B. Vyas, the state's divisional commissioner.

Afghanistan appeared to suffer the least damage. In its east, an 11-year-old girl was crushed to death when a wall in her home collapsed, police official Gafar Khan said.

An eight-member U.N. team of top disaster coordination officials was due to arrive in Islamabad on Sunday to plan the global body's response.

The only serious damage reported in Pakistan's capital was the collapse of a 10-story apartment building, where at least 10 people were killed and 126 were injured. Hospital doctors said the dead included an Egyptian diplomat, and the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo said two Japanese were killed.