Philippine officials said yesterday more than 100 bodies had been recovered and another 100 people were missing, feared dead, after a mountain of rubbish crashed down on Manila's Promised Land shantytown.
"It's a recovery operation, not a search-and-rescue operation," the Philippine Defence Secretary, Mr Orlando Mercado, told reporters nearly 40 hours after an avalanche of rain-drenched rubbish thundered down on the squatters' colony.
By mid-afternoon yesterday at least 101 bodies had been retrieved.
The Red Cross had previously estimated 70 were missing but the local civil defence office put the number at several hundred.
The dumpsite - called Lupang Pangako (Promised Land) - is a bleak underworld of 80,000 slum-dwellers, most of whom trek up the mountain of garbage daily to forage for items to sell to junk shops. For 20 years, it has stood as a symbol of the massive poverty in the Philippines. Each scavenger earns about 200 pesos ($4.50) a day.
Soldiers and volunteers, toiling through the night aided by floodlights, gave even more chilling projections of the number buried alive.
"Only about 5 per cent of the total has been recovered," army Lieut Fausto Tapiador said.
Red Cross press officer Mr Kit Villaranda said rescuers were digging at 17 sites. At least 100 shacks - some not much bigger than push carts - were buried in one site alone, Mr Villaranda said. As night fell, the odour from rotting corpses was nearly as overwhelming as the stench from the garbage itself.
One elderly woman who had lost her daughter in the disaster and was looking for other relatives, broke down and wept.
"They have found my daughter's body and it was badly burned. They also found the body of her daughter, but its head was gone," Mra Conchita Ramos wailed.
"We are not blaming anyone for this but we want to have their bodies back."