PAKISTAN: Monsoon rains leave at least 200 dead

ISLAMABAD, 10 August 2006 (IRIN) - Flooding has killed at least 200 people in Pakistan since the start of the monsoon season in mid-July. Thirteen people were killed in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) on Tuesday when flooding swept away the pick-up truck they were travelling on. Officials said that 12 bodies had so far been found at the scene in the Khwazakhela area of the Swat District. On Monday a woman and her four children were killed when a landslide crushed the temporary shelter they had been living in since an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale devastated northern Pakistan and Pakistani-administered Kashmir on 8 October last year. Police Superintendent Zahoor Gilani said that heavy rain triggered the landslide in Balabandi village, 60 km south of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. “Around midnight, a huge mass of earth engulfed one shelter completely, giving no time to any of the five inmates to escape,” Gilani said. The latest incidents follow the death of at least 100 people when a bridge collapsed in the city of Mardan, 65 km from Peshawar, capital of NWFP, on Saturday. An estimated 150 people were on the bridge watching surging floodwaters when it crumbled. Many are still missing. The flooding has also destroyed houses, roads, railway tracks, water supplies and sewerage pipes and left crops ruined across the country. It is particularly affecting the more than three million people left homeless by the October earthquake, which killed at least 73,000 people. Pakistan's Metrological Office is predicting more heavy rain in the next 10 days. However, Irrigation Department officials said river levels were falling in the Peshawar area except in the River Sindh, which was in high flood at Chashma.