CHINA: A powerful earthquake in the Pamir mountains on China's remote border with Kyrgyzstan has killed hundreds of villagers as they were eating breakfast and as their children entered school.
As the first rescuers yesterday reached Bachu county, near the epicentre of the 6.8 magnitude earthquake, the official death toll quickly climbed to 247 with over 1,000 injured.
At least 10 of the victims were children attending the county school which collapsed and others were caught in a one-storey health clinic.
"Some people are holding funerals in accordance with Uighur tradition, while rescue workers are attending to the injured," said a Kashgar official.
"The place is in complete chaos," he said.
The official Xinhua news agency said over 1,000 buildings collapsed and the tremors were felt in Kashgar, the silk road oasis town and the largest in the region.
Mr Zhou Mingcheng, a private businessman who runs a flour mill in stricken Arlagen village in Bachu county, and his family escaped from their collapsing home, make of bricks and tiles, just in time.
"We were sleeping at the time, and it was still dark. We ran out immediately when it began to shake," he said.
Two of the four rooms in his home became rubble, but Mr Zhou considered himself lucky - more than 100 people in his village of 1,000 were feared dead.
"Lots of rooms here collapsed. There is no electricity. Lots of people are outside now and no one dares stay at home."
Xinhua said the earthquake struck at 10 a.m. local time and the epicentre was in the sparsely populated Jiashi county but villages scattered in Bachu county, with a total population of 370,000, was hardest hit.
Officials in the provincial capital of Urumqi have started sending grain, milk and blankets to the region where the temperatures hover above zero.
An aid convoy carrying tents and blankets is expected to reach the needy within 24 hours.
Most of the inhabitants are ethnic Uighurs, Turkic-speaking Moslems as well as Kazakh and Kirgiz herders.
It is reported to be the worst earthquake to hit the region in 50 years.
In Kashgar officials warned of the danger of further after shocks.
"They happen one after another. The biggest was around five on the Richter scale,"' said an official in Kashgar. "We could feel the quake strongly."