INDIA: Plummeting temperatures, avalanches and food shortages brought on by the coldest winter in years have killed hundreds of people, including many children, in the mountainous regions of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Indian army helicopters dropped food, medicine and blankets to avalanche-hit villages in northern India's war-torn Kashmir province yesterday as soldiers recovered 40 more bodies. This brought the death toll in Kashmir to nearly 300, including 20 soldiers, over the past week. Another 300 people were still missing, according to officials.
In some places the dead lay unburied because the snow was too deep to dig graves.
The Indian weather department said the worst of the freeze was over, but warned that warmer temperatures were increasing the risk of further avalanches. "Sunshine will make the snow unstable, increasing the frequency of avalanches," Maj-Gen Raj Mehta said.
Afghanistan's health minister, Mr Mohammed Amin Fatemi, said that about 180 children had died in the coldest winter in years, almost half of them in the Hindu Kush province of Ghor, where scores of villages have been cut off by snow. The Afghan government has yet to give an estimate of casualties from remote, snowbound regions, but it dismissed as "alarmist" forecasts by relief agencies that the death toll could run into thousands.
The governor of the south-eastern Zabul province, Mr Khan Mohammed Husseini, said that two out of 135 people who had died of cold, hunger and disease had been attacked by starving wolves.
In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, officials said that 58 people had died over the past two weeks, mostly in avalanches.
The heaviest snowfall in 13 years was reported in Pakistan's western Baluchistan province, where 11 people died in a village when their mud-brick houses collapsed under the weight of snow.