Some 600 prisoners flee from jail after Iran quake

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, December 28, 2003

Some 600 prisoners flee from jail after Iran quake

Around 600 prisoners were on the run in the southeastern Iranian city of Bam after their jail was destroyed in a devastating earthquake, local officials confirmed on Saturday.

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Around 600 prisoners were on the run in the southeastern Iranian city of Bam after their jail was destroyed in a devastating earthquake, local officials confirmed on Saturday.

"The prison partly collapsed. Some of the prisoners were killed, others escaped," Assadollah Iranmanesh, spokesman for a regional emergency committee, told the press, adding that "places particularly prone to looting are secure."

Another official also played down the possibility that the runaway prisoners could cause chaos. "They are probably busy looking for their families," he said.

The official IRAN news agency quoted a judiciary official as saying that 700 prisoners from the jail had been released "on leave".

A powerful earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale struckthe city of Bam in Kerman Province before dawn on Friday. The Iranian state TV Saturday quoted the Interior Ministry as reporting that 20,000 people had been confirmed killed and 30,000 injured in the earthquake.

The IRAN news agency said 7,000 policemen had been dispatched to Bam to help facilitate aid operations. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has ordered related authorities to speed up rescue efforts.

Iran fears quake toll could hit 40,000

Relatives and rescuers used everything from bare hands to bulldozers Saturday to retrieve victims of a powerful earthquake that crumbled vast swaths of this city of mud-brick buildings into powder and frost-chilled rubble, killing thousands of people.

The destruction was so all-encompassing that a reliable death toll in the city of 80,000 was still unavailable. Most people were asleep when the earthquake, which the U.S. Geological Survey measured at magnitude 6.6, struck at 5:28 a.m. Friday. The Interior Ministry estimated the death toll at 20,000 but officials in the region said it could be double that amount.

"An unbelievable human disaster has occurred," said Akbar Alavi, the governor Kerman, the provincial capital. "As more bodies are pulled out, we fear that the death toll may reach as high as 40,000."

But other officials said later Saturday the number of dead would be lower.

"The figures are not correct; no precise statistics on the number of casualties are available yet but it seems that number of the victims is less," Deputy Governor Mohammad Farshad told the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The Interior Ministry estimated the number of injured at 30,000.

One American was killed and another injured as they visited the city's 2,000-year-old citadel, a U.S. State Department official said in Washington. The injured American was hospitalized in Tehran, State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said. The victims' names were not released.

Bam, in southeast Iran about 630 miles from Tehran, suffered such extreme damage because most of the buildings are made of unreinforced mud brick and the quake was centered only about 10 miles outside the city, said Harley Benz, a USGS seismologist.

"The communities in this part of Iran are really not resilient to earthquakes," said Benz, head of the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. "It's very sad and unfortunate."

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