Nūrgal (Afghanistan) (AFP) – Volunteers and rescuers were pulling more bodies from the rubble of destroyed buildings in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, four days after an earthquake that inflicted a death toll that was already at nearly 1,470 people, Taliban authorities said.
The magnitude-6.0 earthquake that jolted the mountainous region bordering Pakistan late Sunday is one of the deadliest in the country in decades.
The toll – 1,469 dead and more than 3,700 injured – will likely rise, deputy Taliban government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said on Thursday.
“Additional bodies were recovered during these efforts, leading to an increase in the reported casualties,” Fitrat wrote on X, adding that a new toll would be released later in the day.
“We cannot stop hoping” that injured people remain alive under the rubble, he told AFP.
Limited access to the hardest hit areas of mountainous Kunar province delayed rescue and relief efforts, with rockfalls from repeated aftershocks obstructing already precarious roads etched onto the side of cliffs.
While most of the areas that had been unreachable were accessed by Wednesday, expectations of finding survivors were fading fast.
“Many survivors are still believed to be trapped beneath collapsed homes in remote villages, and the window for finding them alive is rapidly closing,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement late on Wednesday.
Poor infrastructure in the impoverished country, still fragile from four decades of war, has also stymied the emergency response.
The WHO warned that local healthcare services were “under immense strain”, with shortages of trauma supplies, medicines and staff.
