Pak provincial minister appeals to world for help for quake victims

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Pakistan Provincial Revenue Minister Zamrak Khan appealed to the whole world for help. “We need food, we need medicine. People need warm clothes, blankets because it is cold here," he said, reports BBC.
At least 160 people have been killed after an earthquake of 6.4 magnitude hit Balochistan province in south-western Pakistan, officials say.
The tremor struck 70km (45 miles) north of Quetta at 0409 (2309GMT Tuesday) at a depth of 10km (6.2 miles), the US Geological Survey said.
Many houses collapsed during the quake and some were destroyed in landslides that followed it, officials said.
Reports say teams of army and paramilitary Frontier Corps troops are in the area, helping to rescue the injured and retrieve bodies.
Senior army official Major General Salim Nawaz said the area remained accessible for convoys carrying relief material.
However, the mountainous region is thinly populated and local infrastructure is poor, making it difficult to get a clear picture of the casualties.
Provincial Revenue Minister Zamrak Khan told Reuters news agency that many affected areas had still not yet been reached.
And a local television correspondent reported that some people in villages outside Quetta were angry that no rescue teams had arrived on the scene.
There were two tremors, striking at about 0409 and then 0510. Officials say there have also been at least three aftershocks.
Many stunned survivors spent the rest of the night in the open, with little more than the clothes in which they had been sleeping.
The worst-hit area appeared to be Ziarat, about 50km north of Quetta, where hundreds of mostly mud and timber houses had been destroyed in five villages, mayor Dilawar Kakar said.
Some homes were buried in a landslide triggered by the quake, he said.
"Our rescuers are still working but we've recovered 160 bodies from various villages in Ziarat," he said. "There is great destruction. Not a single house is intact," he added.
He said hundreds more people had been injured and some 15,000 made homeless.
"I would like to appeal to the whole world for help. We need food, we need medicine. People need warm clothes, blankets because it is cold here," he said.
Another senior official in Ziarat, Sohail-ur-Rehman, said that the authorities were also scrambling to bury the dead.
"Graves are being dug with excavators as we can't keep dead bodies in the open," he told the Reuters news agency.
In the village of Sohi, a reporter for AP Television News saw the bodies of 17 people killed in one collapsed house and 12 from another. Distraught residents were digging a mass grave in which to bury them.