ALGERIA: Anger against the government is rising in Algeria after the death toll from last week's earthquake surpassed 2,000 yesterday .
The plight of the newly-homeless and the risk of disease are adding to public anger over the heavy loss of life. Hopes of finding more survivors have been all but extinguished.
In Reghaia, 40 km east of Algiers, where 100 households came crashing down in a single 10-storey apartment, the pile of rubble had been reduced to a mound no more than a few metres high.
The last time someone was pulled out alive was sometime on Saturday, and he died on the way to hospital, onlookers said.
Workers were still recovering bodies, badly decomposed on the fourth day since Wednesday's quake, at a rate of about one every 20 minutes.
The body of a man was identified by his son, who broke down in sobs.
A neighbour who knew the young man only by his first name, Mahmoud, said he had already identified his sisters and mother and had only his father left.
Protesters in Boumerdes, where more than half of the deaths occurred, mounted an extraordinary show of defiance during a visit by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Saturday, chasing him out of town under a hail of insults and projectiles scraped up from the rubble.
Mr Bouteflika's visit was seen as a callous attempt to make political hay of the tragedy as presidential elections approach in less than a year, and awakened an undercurrent of discontent over enduring socio-economic problems facing the north African country.
The liberal press pulled no punches in reporting the incident, some even calling on Mr Bouteflika to resign, but the daily Le Matin predicted that "as usual, in a splendid ostrich posture, the government will fail to heed the major warnings Algerians are sending it".
Algerian Foreign Minister, Mr Abdelaziz Belkhadem, sought to play down the Boumerdes incident, saying on state radio a few hours afterward: "Given the enormous needs, the protests are understandable." He also defended the rescue efforts, insisting that the government had "responded rapidly" .
Meanwhile the official death toll stood at 2,047 early yesterday, with 8,626 wounded and hundreds still unaccounted for, and the final toll looked set to exceed the high mark of 1980, when a massive earthquake in the northwestern Chlef area killed some 3,000 people.
That disaster led to a stiffer building code, but its rules have been manifestly bent or ignored by unscrupulous developers using shoddy construction materials and methods, critics have said. In addition, many of the collapses occurred in unstable areas legally off-limits to builders.
Meanwhile, as aftershocks continue to shake the region, raising fears of further collapses of buildings, hundreds of people have abandoned their homes, demanding emergency lodging from the government to no avail.
State radio warned that the risk of epidemics was increasing with the already baking temperatures of late spring.