Quake Toll Soars; Scores Rescued

Relatives and rescuers used everything from bare hands to bulldozers Saturday to retrieve victims and possible survivors of the powerful earthquake that crumbled vast swaths of this city of mud-brick buildings into powder and frost-chilled rubble a day earlier.

The destruction was so all-encompassing that a reliable death toll in the city of 80,000 could not be computed. Most people were still at home and asleep when the 6.3-magnitude quake struck at 5:28 a.m. local time Friday.

The Interior Ministry had estimated the death toll at 20,000 and officials in the region said it could be double that figure.

But other officials said later Saturday that the numbers are much less.

"The figures are not correct; no precise statistics on the number of casualties are available yet but it seems that number of the victims is less," Deputy Governor Mohammad Farshad told the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Abbas Jazayer, director-general of Iran's Natural Disasters Headquarters, also refuted the high numbers.

The Interior Ministry estimated the number of injured survivors at 30,000.

Searchers carried the injured in their arms, on stretchers and in the backs of trucks, seeking help outside Bam's earthquake-crumpled hospitals or on the airport tarmac while awaiting evacuation in military and civilian planes to Kerman city, the provincial capital, about 120 miles to the northwest, and to other Iranian cities.

Provincial government official Saeed Iranmanesh told The Associated Press that 3,000 dead have been buried and over 9,000 injured have been hospitalized in different parts of the country.

About 150 people, including a baby less than 1 year old, were pulled alive as family and rescuers tore away the rubble with their hands on Saturday, Revolutionary Guards officer Masoud Amiri said. He said the baby appeared to be in "stable" condition, despite spending more than 24 hours in the rubble.

Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported that search dogs belonging to foreign rescue teams had detected 20 people alive under the rubble, who were dug out and taken for treatment. The agency gave no details.

By late afternoon, the line of trucks and cars trying to get into Bam had backed up aoubt one and one-half miles at the city's edge. Some were loaded with blankets and other relief materials, while others carried people seeking relatives or volunteering to help.

Governments and relief organizations mobilized around the globe, with rescue workers, search dogs and emergency relief supplies arriving, en route or prepared for departure from Japan to California, from South Africa to South Korea, from Switzerland, Germany, Italy, China, the Czech Republic, Russia, Armenia and beyond.

Tehran waived visa requirements for foreign relief workers.

The Bush administration is sending 150,000 pounds of medical supplies in a military airlift to quake-ravaged Iran, White House officials said Saturday.

"We greatly welcome any assistance from the United States. We welcome assistance from all countries except Israel," said Kerman city governor Akbar Alavi.

Washington is also dispatching teams of about 200 search-and-rescue, disaster relief coordination and surgical experts from Fairfax County, Va., Los Angeles and Boston, said spokesman Scott McClellan. Disaster-response experts will also be drawn from three federal agencies.

The aid shipments are the result of highly unusual direct communications between Iran and the United States, which maintain no formal diplomatic ties.

Senior administration officials emphasized the assistance does not mark a change in U.S. policy toward Iran, which remains on the State Department's list of sponsors of terrorism.

But the airlift could help thaw relations with Iran, which President Bush branded part of an "axis of evil" last year. The United States says Iran sponsors terrorism, is trying to acquire nuclear weapons and has a poor human rights record.

Among the medical supplies being shipped aboard six C-130 cargo planes are blood, food, blankets and plastic sheeting for temporary housing, officials said.

The U.S. teams' equipment includes special cameras that can fit in tight crevices to search for survivors amid wreckage.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called Iran's envoy to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, to convey condolences and offer relief supplies, administration officials said.

The call was out of the ordinary: The United States normally communicates with Tehran through Swiss intermediaries. But State Department officials deemed the earthquake disaster urgent enough to merit personal communication, aides said.

By landing military planes in Iran, the humanitarian mission was extraordinary in another respect. According to one senior White House official, few if any American soldiers have set foot in Iran since President Jimmy Carter ordered a mission in 1980 to rescue U.S. hostages.

Two Americans were among the casualties in the devastating earthquake that rocked southeastern Iran Friday, a State Department official said.

Spokesman Lou Fintor said one American was killed and another was injured in the powerful quake in the ancient city of Bam.

The State Department did not release the names of the two Americans, who were visiting the city's 2,000-year-old citadel at the time.

Fintor said the injured American has been hospitalized in Tehran and is receiving medical care. The injuries are serious but do not appear to be life-threatening, he said.

Alavi, the governor of Kerman city said, "An unbelievable human disaster has occurred. As more bodies are pulled out, we fear that the death toll may reach as high as 40,000."

The leader of an Iranian relief team, Ahmad Najafi, said he also feared the toll could reach 40,000. He said that in one street alone in Bam on Saturday, 200 bodies had been extracted from the rubble in a single hour.

In another part of Bam, a gray-bearded man in his 50s, wearing the white turban common to rural villages in this southeastern corner of Iran, watched with resignation as four men dug with their bare hands and a single shovel.

What had once been his home was a flattened pile of rubble and dust. He pointed to where the bedrooms should have been, seemingly resigned that none of his three teenage children or his wife would be found alive.

Suddenly, there could be seen a slender hand protruding from a red pajama sleeve. "My Atefah's hand!" he cried, before he fainted. Other helpers caught him before he fell to the ground.

Behind him, the body of a girl in her teens was excavated and quickly covered with a blanket. Then the bodies of his sons and a woman in her 40s were found.

No one was alive. No one who had helped uncover them knew their names.

In another neighborhood, a man interrupted Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari as he spoke to reporters. "My father is under the rubble," the man said, with tears rolling down his face. "I've been asking for help since yesterday, but nobody has come to help me. Please help me. I want my father alive."

Lari tried to calm the man and asked an aide to help him.

"There is not a standing building in the city. Bam has turned into a wasteland," he said.

"The disaster is far too huge for us to meet all of our needs," President Mohammad Khatami said Friday when he declared three days of mourning.

Thousands of survivors prepared to spend a second night outdoors, sleeping in tents or under blankets or whatever they could find as temperatures dropped to the freezing point. Relief workers had managed to set up a few hundred tents Friday, and more temporary shelters went up Saturday.

The earthquake brought an unexpected reprieve for about 800 convicts at the local prison. Prison guard Vahid Masoumpour told the AP that all the inmates fled, apparently unhurt, when the walls cracked open and collapsed.

The quake destroyed most of Bam's citadel — a medieval fortress made of mud-brick, parts of which date back 2,000 years. The citadel's highest section, including a distinctive square tower, crumbled like a sand castle.

The U.N. cultural agency, UNESCO, has asked for permission to send experts to assess the damage. UNESCO had been considering declaring the citadel a protected World Heritage Site.

Some of citadel's walls were still standing Saturday, but there were cracks and holes. A score of young men had gathered to see the damage, and one of them wept.

"My grief is twofold," Reza Husseini, a 25-year-old archaeology student, as tears streaked through the dust that covered his hair and his bruised face. "I've lost two members of my family, and I've lost my history, my citadel."

He was unable to speak further about his family.

Aftershocks throughout the day Friday registered as high as 5.3, according to the geophysics institute of Tehran University.

The quake's epicenter was outside Bam, and nearby villages were also damaged.

In Iran, quakes of more than magnitude 5 usually kill people because most buildings are not built to withstand earthquakes, although the country sits on several major fault lines and temblors are frequent. Iran has a history of earthquakes that kill thousands of people, including one of magnitude 7.3 that killed about 50,000 people in northwest Iran in 1990.