CHITRAL, Pakistan —Rehmatud Din walked 10 hours and scrambled through landslide debris to reach his family in this remote northwestern town that was devastated by a magnitude-7.5 earthquake this week. When he finally arrived, he learned that his 6-year-old daughter had died after being crushed by the roof of their home, and that she had already been buried by relatives.
“I did my best to reach Chitral but boulders and landslides had blocked all the roads,” Din said Thursday, tears welling in his eyes. “I lost her at such a young age.” The death toll from Monday’s quake – centered in Afghanistan’s sparsely populated Badakhshan province that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China – stood at 390. According to officials, at least 272 people were killed in Pakistan, 121 in Afghanistan and three on the Indian side of the disputed Kashmir region.
A report released by the National Disaster Management Authority says 32 people were killed in Chitral, the Pakistani town closest to the quake’s epicenter. At least 50 people were killed in the nearby Shangla, the country’s worst affected area.
Din, a 45-year-old construction worker, was on a job in the nearby town of Gilgit when the earthquake struck. He said his wife gathered their six other children in an open area outside their home, but 6-year-old Zar Shi was caught in the roof collapse. She died at the local hospital after neighbors pulled her out from the rubble.
Aysha Saddiqa, 12, was overcome with grief and unable to answer a reporter’s questions about her sister. With tears rolling down her face, she simply looked at the rubble covering places where they used to play together.
Residents in Chitral were trying to salvage their possessions on Thursday. They called for government help to repair their homes, saying they are too poor to do it themselves. Housing is urgently needed, with snow already falling on nearby mountains.
Students in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat Valley on Thursday returned to some of the schools damaged by the quake. Authorities had earlier said that nearly 150 schools sustained damages in the northwest.
In the town of Kabal, students were seen studying outside one of the damaged schools. Principal Mohammad Iqbal said no one was hurt because he closed the school about 30 minutes before the quake struck on account of heavy rains.
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