Torrential rain hampered rescue efforts yesterday as survivors searched for relatives in the rubble of collapsed homes in 40 villages near the town of Zarand in a mountainous area of Kerman province. Weeping villagers carried away bodies in bloodied blankets and bed sheets, the victims’ funerals starting almost immediately. “My whole family is dead,” one man cried on state television.

The 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck at 5.55am, lasted 11 seconds, and was the deadliest to hit Iran since December 2003 when 31,000 perished in the ancient city of Bam.

Relief teams from the Iranian Red Crescent were distributing food, tents and blankets, while many of the displaced were expected to be given refuge in nearby villages. Despite freezing temperatures, others were spending last night outdoors for fear of aftershocks. Frequent earthquakes and the eight-year war with Iraq during the 1980s have given Iran valuable experience in coping with harrowing disasters. Rescue and relief teams are well organised and equipped and can mobilise swiftly.

Three villages were very badly damaged with virtually every building affected. In another 30 villages, roughly a third of the buildings were said to have been damaged or destroyed.

“It’s almost completely devastated. There’s almost nothing left of the buildings,” Kari Egge, Unicef’s representative in Iran, said from the village of Douhan, about 12 miles from Zarand. “It’s cold and has been raining. There’s no shelter, nowhere for people to stay.”

The United Nations says that no country in the world is more afflicted by earthquakes than Iran, which is at the meeting point of three of the Earth’s plates. Iran has at least a minor earthquake every day. On average, the country has suffered a devastating earthquake once a decade. Before the Bam quake the last huge one was in 1990 when at least 35,000 people were killed in northwest Iran by earthquakes measuring up to 7.7 on the Richter scale. In b etween those two tragedies, nearly 1,000 tremors in Iran claimed about 17,600 lives.

The devastation in the provinces has long left residents of the capital, Tehran, wondering what would happen if their sprawling city of 12 million people was next. The city, hit by a quake of about 7 on the Richter scale in 1830, is perched on lethal geological faults and some experts estimate as many as 700,000 of its residents could die if a “big one” struck again, leaving the country “decapitated”.

A few months before the Bam earthquake, a geophysicist at Tehran University formally suggested to President Khatami that the capital be moved to a safer part of the country, a proposal first aired in 1991.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, called yesterday’s earthquake a “terrible disaster” and promised that Britain would do all it could to help Iran.

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