BALAKOT, Pakistan -- President Pervez Musharraf pleaded for international help yesterday to hurry rescue equipment and relief supplies to tens of thousands of earthquake victims in Pakistan, while desperate survivors begged for government help that still had not arrived in large areas of the quake zone.
As the confirmed death toll climbed to 20,000, Musharraf asked the United States, Britain and other international donors to send heavy-lift helicopters, financial aid, medical supplies and tents after Saturday's magnitude-7.6 temblor.
The Pentagon promised delivery today of eight military helicopters from Afghanistan.
The helicopters, needed in part to get heavy equipment to rescuers working with little more than hand tools, may be too late for hundreds of children trapped in numerous collapsed schools across northern Pakistan. The quake struck about 8:50 a.m. Saturday as students were preparing for classes to begin.
At the ruins of the Shaheen Private School in the devastated northwestern town of Balakot, survivors exhausted from hours of trying to unearth students by hand listened helplessly yesterday as trapped children pleaded for rescue and struggled to survive under the rubble. Residents waited amid corpses covered by battered sheets of corrugated tin roofing and complained bitterly about the lack of outside help.
"They are alive, but we do not have the expertise to get them out," said a dejected woman sitting on the school's roof that lay across the rubble of walls shattered by the violent quake.
One resident said a child under the rubble had called out his name for two hours. Then there was silence.
Residents feared that more than 1,000 children were trapped in the debris of Shaheen and two other schools in Balakot, which was flattened by the quake's force.
Several people in the town, about 70 miles north of Islamabad, the capital, cursed the government for not reaching the trapped people of Balakot in time to save more lives.
"All we could see for the whole day is just two military helicopters," said Sajid Hussain, a local resident. "We whistled and waved to them, but they vanished."
The bodies of at least 400 children were recovered from two other destroyed schools in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, where Balakot is located. Rescuers have been able to pull dozens of children out alive from some of the collapsed schools.
