IRAN: The stench of death filled Iran's earthquake-devastated city of Bam yesterday and fears grew the toll could reach 30,000 people.
Aid poured in from around the world, including Iran's arch-foe the United States, to help deal with the world's most lethal earthquake in at least 10 years.
Aftershocks continued to shake the region as hopes faded of finding more survivors and looters sabotaged aid efforts.
"I believe the toll will reach 30,000," said a government official. "Some outlying villages are even more badly damaged than Bam, they are 100 per cent destroyed." An Interior Ministry spokesman said the death toll had reached 22,000, but was likely to rise. The ministry said 20,500 bodies had been recovered and buried by yesterday afternoon.
The quake struck Bam before dawn on Friday, flattening 70 per cent of the mostly mud-brick buildings in the ancient Silk Road city, 1,000 km south-east of Tehran.
Some 30,000 people were injured and aid workers estimate more than 100,000 people may have been left homeless.
Cemeteries overflowed. Mullahs, in shirt-sleeves rather than their usual robes and wearing face-masks, tore sheeting to shroud corpses.
There was no time to wash the bodies according to Islamic practice. They were brought in blankets, sprayed with disinfectant and tipped into trenches hollowed out by mechanical diggers.
"We are beginning to smell the stench of death. If we haven't cleared the area by the end of the week there will be a threat of epidemics," an Iranian rescuer said.
Survivors were spending a third night in the open in temperatures of 7 degrees, burning cardboard and any other material they could find to fend off the cold. Television reports said rain was threatening to make life even more wretched.
Bam airport has become a sprawling, makeshift hospital and rubble-strewn pavements are lined with injured, some on intravenous drips.
Mr Alain Pasche of the UN co-ordination team said 500 to 600 foreign rescue workers were on the scene. "The SAR (Search and Rescue) will continue at least for one more day. After five days the chances of finding anyone alive are very slim."
Vans of young men armed with pistols and Kalashnikov assault rifles drove into Bam and stole Red Crescent tents, while others on motorbikes chased aid trucks, picking up blankets thrown out by soldiers.
Local people and some aid workers said relief efforts were chaotic. "There is no organisation. Whoever is stronger takes the aid," one resident said.
Countries pledging aid included the US which severed ties with Tehran 25 years ago and has branded Iran part of an "axis of evil" for allegedly developing weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Ari Vakkilainnen, leading a Finnish rescue team, said yesterday only 30 people had been dug out alive overnight and he did not think many more survivors would be found.
An Iranian rescue worker said: "We are using our bare hands. On Friday, a baby was pushed through the rubble by its parents. The parents died."