ALGERIA: In just a few terrifying seconds, apartment blocks swayed and then toppled, crushed like paper straws by a powerful earthquake which struck northern Algeria, killing more than 1,000 people.
Cries of terror and anguish rent the air as concrete, bricks and mortar collapsed into mounds of rubble and dust late on Wednesday in the quake, which geologists measured at 6.7 on the Richter scale.
Almost 7,000 people were injured in the earthquake which brought down power lines, plunging Algiers into darkness.
Thousands were left homeless again last night.
Women and children, just sitting down to dinner, fled their homes seeking shelter, with many people spending a terrifying night in their gardens or cars.
In the worst-affected town of Boumerdes, 50 km east of the capital, thousands were feared trapped beneath the debris.
Residents organised themselves to help friends and neighbours.
"Old Rashid. Don't forget old Rashid.
"Help his wife to get him down," someone shouted into the night sky, as the men rushed back into a Algiers apartment block to help a paralysed neighbour.
Debris was strewn around the building as the facade cascaded down with a terrifying boom, spreading even more panic among the fleeing residents.
"Mummy, mummy, don't leave me!" a terrified child wailed.
In the university town of Rouiba, on the far eastern outskirts of the Algerian capital, a three-storey faculty building had simply folded in on itself. Houses all around were damaged but still standing.
Rescuers who worked through the night managed to pull a young woman, whose name was given only as Latifa, from the wreckage of the Bab-Ezzouar faculty building.
However, her husband was not as fortunate. He was crushed to death in the collapse.
Several kilometres away at Reghaia, a 10-storey apartment block had simply crumpled, entombing its residents, even though many nearby buildings were left intact.
Early yesterday scenes of devastation greeted residents as they crept back fearfully to their homes after spending the night in the open.
Women and children timidly climbed the stairs of apartment blocks, encouraged by other, braver residents already standing on their balconies surveying the damage, and offering up thanks that their lives had been spared.
Inside the apartments furniture had been overturned, plates and dishes smashed to smithereens, pots of soup lay already drying on the floor.
"My apartment was completely devastated. The armchair, the crockery, the television, everything was thrown to the ground, broken," a shaken Seghir said.
There was anger at the government, too, accused of leaving the old buildings to rot since independence from France in 1962.
"If they had controlled and maintained the buildings, there wouldn't have been so much damage, such as the broken pipes, cut gas lines," one old man said, as he painfully climbed the stairs while attempting to haul a bottle of gas.