THE labrador darted across the rubble of the collapsed hospital, pushing his muzzle into crevices. On the ground, the rescue team stood in the pouring rain, waiting for a bark.

“You’re looking for survivors but 99 per cent, there’s no hope,” John Anderson, one of the British rescue team leading the search operation, said.

On cue, the dog handler shook his head at the waiting team and put the dog on its lead. “Mark that building,” Geoff Parkinson, another rescuer, ordered. “Searched; no live; unknown dead.”

He sighed. “The situation is so terrible I’m not sure whether these people are better off living or dead,” he said, surveying the shattered buildings where people picked through rubble in the rain. “They’re getting desperate. Usually we’d work at night to keep looking for survivors. But the security situation here is so risky we can’t.”

In the shattered city of Muzaffarabad hopes of finding any survivors is fading fast. It is now the fate of the living that is growing more desperate by the day. As the search-and-rescue missions wind down, the hunt for food, water and shelter has grown more frantic among the thousands left homeless.

As a fourth day passed without the arrival of international aid, people took their survival into their own hands. Men roamed the streets searching for anything that they could claim from the rubble: clothes, blankets, firewood.

At the market opposite the university football stadium, where hundreds of families are camped out in the open, young men prised locks from shuttered shops to find supplies. Two rival groups began jostling as they vied for access, voices and sticks raised in anger. “It’s not stealing, it’s the only thing we can do to help our families,” Ghulah Jilani, a youthful father of three, shouted. “We don’ t have any choice. Nobody has given us anything.”

Inside the stadium, more scuffles broke out as police tried to distribute the little aid that had reached the city, brought by individuals who had filled vans with food and clothing and driven them along treacherous mountain roads. A sea of hands grasped as police threw blankets from a van.

Suddenly someone spied biscuits and water under the blankets and began trying to pull them out. Others joined in. The policemen drew their sticks and began beating at the hands. “This is terrible. There is no discipline. It’s chaos,” Qazi Babr, the businessman who had collected the donations and driven them into the city, said. “There should be someone to take command.”

The survivors’ misery deepened as torrential rain and hail sent people scurrying for cover under shelters fashioned from whatever they could find — flimsy polythene, straw mats, carpets and tarpaulins. Underfoot, the muddy field quickly turned into a swamp.

Beneath a see-through plastic shelter, a little girl began to wail. “She is sick,” her mother said. “We have no medicine.”

The day before a student living in the camp had brought cough syrup looted from a pharmacy for all the children. Today it was all gone. The homeless did not know it but inter- national convoys had set off that day for Muzaffarabad but were forced to turn back by the rain for fear of landslides on the winding mountain roads.

Outside in the rubble, soldiers searched collapsed buildings, no longer looking for the living but for the dead. With only shovels and pickaxes as tools, the progress was slow.

“Can the dogs find the dead as well?” Major Naikman, an army commander asked the British team.

Mr Parkinson shook his head. “They’re only trained to find the living,” he said.

The major gazed at the rubble. “There must be thousands of bodies still there,” he said. “If they are not removed there will soon be disease and more will die. Enough have died already.”

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