Rescuers on Friday braved aftershocks to pull bodies from the rubble and search for survivors after Peru’s most devastating earthquake in nearly four decades left around 500 dead.

Wednesday’s mammoth earthquake wrought untold destruction especially along Peru’s southern coast, which accounted for the greatest number of casualties.

One official estimate put the number of dead at around 500, although that figure was likely to climb sharply as rescuers continued to retrieve corpses from collapsed buildings.

“The toll has jumped to between 500 and 510 dead and 1,600 injured,” the head of the country’s firefighter service, Roberto Ocno, told AFP.

“There are dead trapped under houses,” he said. “There are several bodies in the streets, people who may have died from heart attacks.”

Civil defence authorities offered a somewhat lower toll, saying some 437 people had died and 829 had been injured. The US Geological Survey (USGS) upgraded the quake to a 8.0 on the Moment Magnitude scale, as the Peruvian government said helicopters and planes were airlifting emergency aid to the hard-hit coastal towns.
President Alan Garcia, while visiting the stricken area yesterday, declared three days of national mourning for the earthquake victims, closing all public buildings including schools, military bases and museums.

The powerful quake cut a path of devastation throughout southern Peru. Buildings collapsed, major highways to the coast were ripped apart asunder and power lines knocked out by the quake, leaving overwhelmed local officials issuing urgent appeals for help.

Survivors wearing blankets walked like ghosts through the ruins.

Dust-covered dead were pulled out and laid in rows in the streets, or beneath bloodstained sheets at damaged hospitals and morgues. Doctors struggled to help more than 1,500 injured, including hundreds who waited on cots in the open air, fearing more aftershocks would send the structures crashing down.

Destruction was centered in Peru’s southern desert, at the oasis city of Ica and the nearby port of Pisco, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of the capital, Lima.

The deputy chief of Peru’s fire department, Roberto Ognio, presented a report saying the death toll from the quake had risen to 510. He did not say where the additional 60 deaths had occurred.

Earlier yesterday, the United Nations said the official toll of 450 dead was expected to rise.

“It is quite likely that the numbers will continue to go up since the destruction of the houses in this area is quite total,” said UN Assistant Secretary-General Margareta Wahlstrom.

The San Clemente church in the main plaza of the gritty fishing port of Pisco was perhaps the single deadliest spot in Wednesday’s magnitude-8 earthquake, which devastated cities and hamlets of adobe and brick across Peru’s southern desert.

Hundreds had gathered in the pews of the San Clemente church Wednesday - the day Roman Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary’s rise into heaven - for a special Mass marking one month since the death of a Pisco man.

INDONESIA JOLTED
Jakarta, AP: A strong undersea earthquake struck eastern Indonesia on Friday, the US Geological Survey and local officials said. No tsunami warning was issued and there were no immediate reports of damage.

The temblor had a preliminary magnitude of 6.2 and hit 230 kilometers southeast of Ambon, the capital of Maluku province, said Suhardjono, an official at Indonesia’s Meteorological and Geophysics Agency who goes by only one name. he USGS said the quake struck 10 kilometers beneath the Banda Sea, but local officials put the depth at around 60 kilometers. The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.

“We have not received any reports of damage,” Suhardjono said, adding that the agency did not issue a tsunami warning because the quake was not strong enough to trigger waves.

Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

In December 2004, a massive earthquake struck off Sumatra island and triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, including 160,000 people in Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh alone. A tsunami off Java island last year killed at least 600.