UNTIL yesterday morning, the 10-storey Margalla tower on the outskirts of Islamabad was one of the Pakistani capital’s most prestigious addresses, home to wealthy businessmen, government officials and foreign diplomats.

By last night, the concrete block had become a tomb to dozens of its elegant residents after being flattened by the most powerful earthquake to hit Pakistan for a century.

“It was like one of those staged demolitions you see on TV,” said Qaiser Rasul, who watched the building collapse from his flat in a nearby block.

Rasul may have lost his home — his building was declared unsafe — but he counted himself lucky to have avoided the fate of his neighbours and thousands of others feared dead across a swathe of devastated towns and villages in the border regions of Pakistan and India.

As darkness fell in Islamabad, rescuers working with bulldozers and bare hands pulled out 11 dead and 82 survivors trapped between slabs of concrete that smashed and split as the Margalla tower toppled.

At least one man was said to have tried to save himself by jumping from his fourth floor flat, but he died instantly.

Officials complained rescue efforts were being thwarted by a lack of equipment. “We simply don’t have the capacity to rescue these people,” said Syed Mushahid Hussain, secretary-general of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, who was on the scene. “We don’t have the sort of cranes and heavy equipment to lift the columns and save the people.”

President Pervez Musharraf described the earthquake as a test of his country. He ordered the military to extend “all-out help” to devastated areas and appealed for calm.

The earthquake, which registered 7.6 points on the Richter scale, struck at 8.50am local time. Its epicentre was 50 miles northeast of Islamabad, but ministers said its force had wiped out entire villages on the Indian and Pakistani sides of Kashmir. It shook buildings in four capitals — Delhi, Kabul and Dhaka as well as Islamabad.

Forty-one soldiers were killed by a huge landslide in Indian-controlled Kashmir and there were several deaths in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir state. In all, at least 250 people died and 800 were injured in India.

As the official death toll across the region reached 3,000 last night, it was clear that Pakistan was worst hit. Officials said more than 2,600 people were known to have been killed, including about 200 Pakistani soldiers, many buried in their bunkers. From the air, some villages appeared to have been obliterated.

“The deaths could be running in the thousands,” said Musharraf’s spokesman, Major-General Shaukat Sultan. “We do not have an exact figure for casualties at the moment but it’s massive.”

The worst-affected places in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir included Muzaffarabad, the regional capital, where dozens of bodies were laid out on the ground in a sports stadium.

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