Looters hamper Iran quake aid efforts as health fears rise

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BAM, Iran - Widespread looting is hampering international efforts to bring aid to the southeast Iranian city of Bam and prevent disease spreading following a huge earthquake in which some 30,000 people are feared to have died, official sources told AFP on Monday.

Iranian security forces were sealing off access to the city to all traffic on Monday except trucks and cars carrying aid supplies and relief workers, according to officials in the administrative office of Kerman province, where the disaster occurred.

The move was taken to stem the kind of chaotic scenes of looting of the badly needed humanitarian supplies seen around the city on Sunday.

The flood of vehicles bringing worried and grieving family members to Bam brought traffic to a standstill. Then trucks carrying aid were set upon by looters and by the time they entered the stricken city they had been cleaned out.

Locals blamed the looting on villagers from surrounding areas unaffected by the quake hoping to cash in on the disaster.

A provincial government source said Bam was also likely to be effectively quarantined from Monday as the emergency operation switched from a rescue mission to an effort to quickly recover bodies from underneath the rubble in order to avert the spread of disease.

Humanitarian aid sources said they were also looking to bring in large quantities of disinfectant.

Hopes were fading of finding any more survivors of from Friday’s quake, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale.

Some officials were talking of up to 30,000 people killed in the quake. Official estimates put the death toll at over 20,000 and rising. So far around 16,000 bodies have been recovered and buried.

And three people were killed Sunday when an Iranian navy helicopter crashed just outside Bam after delivering aid, the student news agency ISNA reported. The two pilots died along with a third person on board.

So far more than 500 helicopters and planes have delivered aid and ferried the wounded out of Bam since the quake, according to Iranian officials.

And some 11,500 injured survivors have been flown to hospitals around the country for treatment, the interior ministry said.

Charter flights landed at Kerman airport Sunday at a rate of one plane every five minutes, while at Bam airstrip planes were touching down every 15 minutes.

The search for survivors will carry on until rescue teams are certain they can find no more victims alive, interior ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani told AFP.

“So long as there is a chance of finding survivors, these operations will continue,” he said. “We will concentrate the operations on places where there is a chance of finding survivors.”

The search was expected to have ended Sunday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said earlier, pointing to the urgent need to rush more international rescue teams to the area.

A UN spokesman in Geneva said that “short of a miracle,” there was no expectation of finding many more survivors.

But the state IRNA news agency reported that some 1,000 people had been pulled alive from the ruins Saturday and Sunday.

Those rescued were located thanks to the “sniffer dogs and hi-tech ultrasound equipment of both Iranian and foreign emergency teams”, the news agency said.

Since Saturday, mechanical diggers have been bulldozing a former wasteground on the western edge of this pulverised city, burying hundreds in mass graves.

Relatives knelt at the side of the mass graves, some with their hands and heads bowed in the dust, paralysed in grief over the loss of loved ones.

In the span of just 100 metres (yards), one AFP correspondent saw about 300 to 400 bodies piled up, wrapped in white cloth and blankets, others rolled in carpets.

Most of the dead were adults, but there was one row of babies wrapped in blankets.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people prepared to spend a third night in the open.

On the ground, freezing night-time temperatures and the disorganization of the relief effort in the face of the massive casualty toll left little hope of further survivors being found. Rescue teams from Switzerland, Turkey, Germany, Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, Finland, Azerbaijan, Spain, Ukraine and Poland were among the first to touch down here in response to Iran’s calls for international aid.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, whose country has waived visa restrictions for relief workers and foreign journalists, said Saturday he would visit Bam and ordered rescue efforts to be speeded up.

IRNA reported that a first US plane bringing aid workers and medical material for rescue operations in Bam, a giant Hercules C-130, arrived at 3:00 am Sunday (2330 GMT Saturday) in Kerman.

Iran and the United States broke off diplomatic relations after the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the taking of American hostages in the Tehran embassy.