Pak landslide: 23 bodies retrieved after 6 days

A national disaster management official says rescue workers have retrieved 23 bodies buried under a landslide in northern Pakistan.

Latif ur Rehman says the bodies, buried for the last six days, were retrieved Saturday and handed over to their families.

He says there could be another seven or eight bodies still buried.

The landslide had engulfed several mud and brick houses after flash floods triggered by torrential rains hit northern and northwestern Pakistan last week, killing over 50.

Several districts remain cut off from the rest of the country after the flooding submerged roads and severed communication lines.

The Pakistani army has been airdropping food supplies into remote areas and evacuated several foreign tourists. 

Pakistani rescue workers searched on Wednesday for 23 people buried in a landslide in northern mountains as the number of people killed by unusually heavy rain rose to 92.

Most of the death and destruction from flash floods and landslides took place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where 65 people were killed, with 929 homes either damaged or completely destroyed, government official Abdul Latif told Reuters.

In the upper reaches of the Kohistan Valley, about 200 km (125 miles) north of the capital, Islamabad, 23 people were missing after being buried under 40 metes (130 feet) of mud, Latif said.

Two bodies and five injured people had been recovered from the landslide, he said.

The worst of the rain occurred on the weekend and the forecast for Wednesday was for mainly dry weather in the worst-hit areas, the Meteorological Department said. Roads blocked by landslides would take longer to clear.

“When the road access is cleared, then our teams can go house to house and survey the damage,” Latif said.

Twelve people were killed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and 15 were killed in the far northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan.