Ahmadinejad feels quake aftershocks as relief effort falls short

Possible rival for the presidency criticises the Iranian government's relief effort and many affected residents agree with him.

A woman lies injured on a stretcher after an earthquake in the city of Varzaqan in northwestern Iran.
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TEHRAN //Iran's government faced criticism from legislators and the public yesterday over its handling of relief efforts after two earthquakes killed more than 300 people and injured thousands.

Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, the health minister, told a session of parliament yesterday that the death toll had jumped by about 50 to 306 after victims died in hospital. More than 3,000 people were injured in the earthquakes, she added in comments broadcast on state radio.

The toll included some 219 women and children, Ms Dastjerdi said, adding that about 2,000 injured people had been released from hospitals soon after the quake because they had only minor injuries.

Members of parliament representing the affected areas complained about the shortage of tents for survivors, the parliamentary news agency Icana reported, and Iran's top legislator, Ali Larijani, stepped into the debate.

"The crisis management headquarters must take broader steps to alleviate these concerns," Mr Larijani, a rival to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and possible candidate in the 2013 presidential elections, said.

Although officials announced on Sunday, less than 24 hours after the disaster, that search and rescue operations had finished and all survivors had been freed from the rubble, some residents expressed disbelief that authorities could have reached some of the most remote villages so soon.

"I know the area well. There are some regions where there are villages that you can't even reach by car," a doctor in Tabriz said yesterday. "It's not possible for them to have finished so soon."

The doctor said he had worked for 24 hours non-stop following the quake, attending to patients from surrounding villages who were rushed to Tabriz for medical care.

"In the first hours after the quake, it was ordinary people and volunteers in their own cars going to the affected areas," the doctor said. "It was more ordinary people helping out than official crisis staff."

The moderate conservative newspaper Asr-e Iran reported that a full 24 hours after the earthquake, some villages had not yet been visited by relief teams.

"(Residents) say that most of the villages have been destroyed and still no tents have been sent, nor has any help been sent for the victims," the report said.

Two large quakes with magnitudes of 6.4 and 6.3 struck East Azerbaijan province on Saturday afternoon, flattening villages and injuring thousands around the towns of Ahar, Varzaghan, and Harees, near the provincial capital of Tabriz.

The earthquakes "should have at most injured 10 people," Bahram Akasheh, a seismologist, told the Iranian Labor News Agency. "A great deal of damage was sustained because of the unsuitable structures in our provinces and villages."

The country sits on several fault lines and is frequently hit by earthquakes. An estimated 40,000 people were killed in 2003 when a temblor flattened the city of Bam in the southern province of Kerman.

Gholamreza Masoumi, a health ministry official and head of the emergency services, said he was concerned about a shortage of makeshift toilets and bottled drinking water that could lead to a spread of disease.

The corpses of farm animals could also contribute to an outbreak, he said.

Images on Iranian state television yesterday showed people in the region sleeping outside in streets and parks, without tents or supplies, as the correspondent said they feared additional aftershocks. More than 50 aftershocks were recorded in the province in the past two days, according to the Tehran-based Iranian Seismological Centre.

Officials said the emergency response to the disaster was rapid, even though relief teams were hampered by the remoteness of quake-hit villages.

"We will rebuild these areas before the start of the winter," Hassan Ghadami, an emergency management official in the interior ministry, told parliament yesterday.

The mud-brick construction of many village buildings was to blame for the wide destruction, he said.

Reza Sheibani, a Tabriz resident who owns a 24-hour pharmacy in Ahar, said the government had acted well in deploying security forces to ensure public order in the panicked hours after the quakes.

Tabriz residents and legislators criticised state-run television's early coverage of the disaster, saying it did not reflect the extent of the damage in the first hours.

The lack of coverage, some said, contributed to a sense that the central government in Tehran did not care much about the people of north-west Iran, most of whom are Azeri Turks, the biggest ethnic minority in the country.

"Even though [on Saturday night] hundreds of people were under the rubble, on the television broadcasts ... there was no mention of the disaster," said Alireza Manadi Safidan, a legislator representing Tabriz, according to the Iranian Students' News Agency.

State television "was busy counting how many medals Iran won" in the Olympics, the doctor in Tabriz said. "They didn't have any reaction to this event."

* Reuters, with additional reporting by Associated Press and Bloomberg News