Daily Times

Army helicopters flew rescue missions for the third day running in an avalanche-hit area of Azad Kashmir as the death toll from the disaster rose to 77 on Thursday, officials said.

The latest victim of the avalanches in Neelum Valley was a six-year-old girl, Safia, who died in hospital on Thursday.

Safia had been pulled out alive on Tuesday after being buried for close to 20 hours, a doctor, quoting the child’s family, said. “She had suffered fractures in her skull and orbital bones and left leg and despite our best efforts died of her brain injuries,” the doctor, Adnan Mehraj, said.

Safia’s family were elated when she was found alive, her uncle, Naseer Ahmed said, but now relatives are in shock. Safia was the 19th member of the family to perish in the Neelum Valley avalanches. “I am not in my senses … we have lost almost everyone in the family from young kids to elderly members,” said a visibly disturbed Ahmed.

“This extreme weather has played havoc with the lives of people living in high altitude mountains,” Azad Kashmir’s top administrative official, Mathar Niaz Rana, said. “We are trying our best to alleviate their sufferings,” he said, as two helicopters were being loaded with relief supplies, including food and medicine, in Muzaffarabad, the capital of AJK.

Meanwhile, in a separate area in Pakistan, further north, five personnel of the Pakistan Army were killed when an avalanche hit them as they were carrying out rescue efforts, according to a senior official. The five were from the engineer corps and helping clear roads covered by landslides in an area of Gilgit-Baltistan, a mountainous region that borders China. Avalanches in the area had earlier killed a woman and child, an official of the local disaster management authority, Farid Ahmed, said. In total, over 122 people have died across Pakistan in snow and landslide-related incidents over the last five days, including 45 deaths in the south-western province of Balochistan.