Hopes of finding survivors amid the devastation of Algeria's earthquake are fading with the death toll now in excess of 1,600.
Despite frantic efforts by teams of foreign and local rescue workers with sniffer dogs the Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the death toll could reach 2,000 as more victims in outlying villages along the North African state's heavily populated Mediterranean coast are disovered.
Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia said 4,200 people had been pulled alive from the rubble of flattened buildings since Wednesday, but confirmed "the victim figures are expected to rise".
State news agency APS said 7,207 people had so far been counted as being injured in the quake, which measured 6.7 on the Richter scale.
The chief priest of the main mosque in the capital, Algiers, told worshippers at Friday prayers that the calamity was - like the flooding and quakes that have plagued the country for years - a message from God to those who had chosen to forget him.
"People think the earthquake is a natural phenomenon, they think they can explain it through science," Mohamed Slimane said in a sermon that was aired on national television. "They forget who is behind it, it is God."
Officials said the area worst-hit was Boumerdes, to the east of Algiers. That town alone accounted for 835 of the dead and still had more than 1,200 missing.
Off the Spanish coast, around 100 fishing boats were sunk by waves sent across the Mediterranean from the quake's epicentre.
Earthquake rescue veterans from several European countries fanned out in teams across the town, using sniffer dogs and listening devices to find survivors.
"Search, search!" one of the rescuers urged his dogs as they disappeared into a mass of broken and crushed concrete that was once a four-storey building.
But with the temperature up to 30°C, no one pretended the chances of survival were good. But teams moved swiftly on from building to building, leaving local residents and civil protection workers to delve for the dead, sometimes with nothing more than sledgehammers and their bare hands.
A brief flicker of hope came when an elite team of French rescuers pulled two-and-a-half-year-old Yousra Hamenniche out of a hole cut in the roof of her apartment block, which had contracted like a giant concertina when the jolt came.
But her release after more than 36 hours was bitter-sweet for her father: six members of his family were still missing.