“There are no people left to recover from under the rubble in any village, and all necessary aid is currently being distributed,” an interior ministry official in charge of disaster management, Hossein Ghadami, told state television on Sunday.
Local officials said all the reported deaths have been in rural areas, an indication of the poorer quality of housing outside cities. “This village is a mass grave,” said Alireza Haidaree, who had been searching for survivors in Baje Baj.
Efforts are on to provide water and shelter to the affected people, as thousands of people huddled in makeshift camps or slept in streets after Saturday’s quakes in fear of more aftershocks. A third earthquake struck early Sunday morning in the same region, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Photographs posted by Iranian news websites showed bodies lying on the floor in the corner of a white-tiled morgue in the town of Ahar, and medical staff, surrounded by anxious residents, treating the injured in the open air as dusk fell.
The first earthquake, a magnitude 6.4, hit Saturday at 4:53 p.m. local time, 37 miles northeast of Tabriz, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which measured 11 aftershocks. Just 11 minutes later, a second quake, measuring 6.3, struck 30 miles northeast of Tabriz. On Sunday morning, at 7:55 a.m. local time, a magnitude-4.0 earthquake struck just outside of Ahar, the USGS said.
The towns of Haris and Varzaqan in East Azerbaijan province in north-western Iran were among those hit. Fars reported that about 110 villages had been damaged. At least were four totally flattened and 60 others sustained extensive damage.
