Hope fades in Iran

BAM, Iran — Hopes of finding more earthquake survivors faded yesterday as rescue workers were faced with the realization that the mud-brick houses became instant tombs for more than 20,000 people.

Rescue help from around the world joined Iranians in the search through powdery debris that left little room for air pockets allowing people to survive while awaiting help.

More than 20,000 bodies, including one American killed while visiting this city’s 2,000-year-old citadel, have been retrieved since Friday’s 6.5 magnitude earthquake in southeastern Iran, a local government spokesman said.

“I believe the toll will reach 30,000,” the Reuters news agency quoted a government official in Kerman province, where the quake struck, as saying. “Some outlying villages are even more badly damaged than Bam. They are 100 percent destroyed.”

Iran’s interior minister said the search would continue.

“We have not lost hope for survivors, and our priority remains to find them,” Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari said.

Asadollah Iranmanesh, spokesman for the provincial governor’s office, said one man was pulled alive from the rubble yesterday. A day earlier, officials reported freeing 150 survivors.

Planes from dozens of countries landed in the provincial capital of Kerman with relief supplies, volunteers and dogs trained to find bodies and survivors in the debris.

U.S. military C-130 cargo planes were among them, despite long-severed diplomatic relations and President Bush’s characterization of Iran as being part of an “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea.

Traffic clogged the roads leading in and out of Bam, 630 miles southeast of Tehran, the Iranian capital.

Survivors with any kind of motor vehicle loaded furniture and whatever else they could salvage and headed for other cities. Incoming traffic brought relief supplies, volunteers and relatives desperate for news of their kin.

Mostafa Biderani and his wife, Zahra Nazari, wept in front of a destroyed police station in the center of Bam, slapping their faces and beating their chests in an Islamic expression of grief.

“I pulled my son out of the rubble this morning,” said Mr. Biderani, who drove from Isfahan, 470 miles to the northwest. “But all my hopes were dashed when I saw the police station had collapsed. I pulled out my son with my bare hands.”

The traditional sun-dried, mud-brick construction of the houses doomed many occupants, as it has for centuries in earthquake-prone Iran.

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