Rescue operations continued for the fourth day on Tuesday in Morocco, devastated by the country's biggest earthquake in over a century, as search teams from Spain, Britain, and Qatar joined efforts to find survivors. As per the State TV, the death toll rose to 2,862, with 2,562 people injured on Monday. On Friday, the north African country was hit by a powerful 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck in the High Atlas Mountains, flattening the traditional mud brick houses ubiquitous in the region.
With much of the area hit by the quake being hard to reach, the authorities have not issued any estimates for the number of missing, as per a Reuters report.
In the village of Tinmel, almost every house was pulverised and the entire community has been left homeless while the stench of death from dozens of animals buried under the rubble wafts through parts of the village, the report added.
Mouhamad Elhasan, 59, recounted the horror of that night who said he had been eating dinner with his family when the tremors began. His 31-year-old son ran outside and was trapped as their neighbour's roof collapsed.
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As Elhasan searched for his crying for help, the crying stopped eventually, and by the time he reached his son, he was dead, the report stated. "If he had stayed inside the house he would have been ok," Elhasan said.
Footage filmed by Spanish rescuer Antonio Nogales of the aid group Bomberos Unidos Sin Fronteras (United Firefighters Without Borders) from the remote village of Imi N'Tala showed men and dogs clambering over steep slopes covered in rubble.
"The level of destruction is ... absolute," Nogales said on Monday as he struggled to find the right word to describe what he was seeing. "Not a single house stayed upright."