Pak villagers hit by floods riot after little or no help arrives

FE Team | Published: July 01, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Villagers carry relief goods dropped by the Pakistani Army in Turbat, Pakistan Saturday. Pakistani troops and rescuers struggled Saturday to help 1.3 million victims of monsoon-triggered floods in the country's southwest, officials said, a day after villa

Hungry victims of floods in southwestern Pakistan rioted, protesting slow, meager aid reaching their marooned villages, according to Internet.
The police fired tear gas and shots into the air but failed to disperse a crowd of several thousand villagers in Turbat who had broken into and ransacked the mayor's office.
The widespread flooding struck after a cyclone dumped torrential rains on the area on Tuesday. Khubah Bakhsh, the relief commissioner for Baluchistan, estimated that 200,000 houseshad been destroyed or damaged. Protesters said they had waded through chest-deep water from outlying areas to voice their anger about the dearth of relief aid.
Many said the only aid they had received was packets of biscuits and bottles of water. Military helicopters continued to drop relief supplies, but many of the more than 800,000 people affected by the flooding, many of them homeless, appeared to have received little or nothing.
In Turbat City and surrounding villages, the first relief supplies began arriving only Thursday.
From a helicopter, a reporter saw just the tops of palm trees protruding from vast sheets of water in some areas. People, cows and goats were stranded on rooftops without water or food, in 109-degree heat.