Quake kills more than 18,000 in South Asia
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-09 18:10

India's government offered condolences and assistance to Pakistan, a longtime rival with which it has been pursuing peace efforts after fighting three wars since independence from British rule in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

Pakistani sailor works at a collapsed building site following an earthquake in Islamabad October 8, 2005. A major earthquake shook cities and villages across the south Asian subcontinent on Saturday, killing more than 18,000 people across a mountainous swath touching Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. [Reuters]

"While parts of India have also suffered from this unexpected natural disaster, we are prepared to extend any assistance with rescue and relief which you may deem appropriate," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a message to Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

India reported at least 340 people killed injured when the quake collapsed 2,700 houses and other buildings in Jammu-Kashmir state. Most of the deaths occurred in the border towns of Uri, Tangdar and Punch and in the city of Srinagar, said B.B. Vyas, the state's divisional commissioner.

Some 215 Pakistani soldiers died in Pakistan's portion of Kashmir, Sultan said. On the India side of the border, at least 39 soldiers were killed when their bunkers collapsed, said Col. H. Juneja, an Indian army spokesman.

In Pakistan's northwestern district of Mansehra, the police chief, Ataullah Khan Wazir, said authorities there pulled the bodies of 250 students from the wreckage of one girls' school in the village of Ghari Habibibullah. Dozens of children were feared killed in other schools.

Mansehra was believed to be a hotbed of Islamic militant activity during the time the Taliban religious militia ruled neighboring Afghanistan. Al-Qaida operatives trained suicide squads at a camp there, Afghan and Pakistani officials told The Associated Press in 2002.