Kyrgyzstan dispatched helicopters yesterday to evacuate victims of an earthquake that killed 75 people, including 41 children, in a remote mountain village near the Chinese border.
Military helicopters flew the injured from the flattened village of Nura, about 10km from China in the Tian Shan mountain range, the Emergency Ministry said in a statement yesterday, a national day of mourning.
''Almost all buildings in the village have been destroyed. The only buildings remaining are those built recently: the school and a medical clinic,'' the statement said.
The death toll rose to 75 after a woman died in hospital overnight, the ministry said. In addition to Nura's population of about 1000, the ministry said about 1000 visitors were in the village when the earthquake hit late on Sunday, among them businessmen, tourists and drivers who had just crossed the Chinese border.
A Russian plane carrying rescue workers and humanitarian aid was due to take off for Kyrgyzstan yesterday.
The tremor was of 6.6 magnitude, according to the US Geological Survey, and was felt as far away as the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, about 400km from Nura.
Hours later, a powerful earthquake struck a sparsely populated area of China's Himalayan region of Tibet, killing nine people, Chinese state media reported.
Kyrgyzstan's Deputy Health Minister, Madamin Karatayev, said the dead in the Kyrgyz earthquake included 41 children.
Survivor Akim Zhoroev recalled, ''It all happened so suddenly, so horribly. The earth suddenly groaned and the house fell apart like cards and, what was worse, my six children were underneath the debris.
''Four of them I dug out with my own hands, and thank Allah they are alive.
''But my two youngest, the poor ones, they died instantly. When I got them out they were dead,'' he said, his voice breaking into uncontrollable sobs.
The head of Kyrgyzstan's Institute of Seismology, Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov, blamed shoddy construction for much of the destruction.
''These were dilapidated houses, made of clay and straw, so they were totally destroyed.'' Rescue efforts were hampered by the remoteness of the village and a lack of telephone links, while roads had become impassable in places, officials said.
The US Geological Survey said the epicentre was 60km east-south-east of the Kyrgyz village of Sary-Tash, at a depth of 27.6km.
Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous nation of five million people, is one of the poorest states of the former Soviet Union.
Monday's deadly earthquake in Tibet struck an area about 85km west of the region's capital, Lhasa, at 4.30pm (8.30pm Canberra time), the US Geological Survey said, putting its magnitude at 6.3.
China's state news agency, Xinhua, initially put the death toll at 30 but later revised it to nine. AFP
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