PORT-AU-PRINCE/GENEVA – The devastating earthquake that struck Haiti earlier this week killed 50,000 people and left 250,000 injured, Health Minister Alex Larsen said. According to initial estimates from the civil defence office, between 750,000 and 1 million people were left homeless by Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 temblor, Larsen told a press conference. The figures were the first the Haitian government has released since the catastrophic earthquake, which international aid organisations said affected 3 million people, or a third of the desperately poor country's population. Tensions rose among desperate Haitians awaiting international aid and food that began to trickle in three days. The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said a convoy carrying a "huge amount" of aid is heading overland from the Dominican Republic to quake-struck Haiti. The IFRC said the aid included a 50-bed field hospital, surgical teams and an emergency telecommunications unit. Spokesman Paul Conneally said the Norwegian, Finnish, Spanish, Danish and Japanese Red Cross workers will arrive in Port-au-Prince in six to eight hours. He told reporters on Saturday that the convoy was travelling overland because "it's not possible to fly anything into Port-au-Prince right now because the airport is completely congested." The IFRC, which represents national Red Cross chapters worldwide, will shortly increase its aid appeal for Haiti. Haiti's shell-shocked government gave the US control over its main airport to bring order to aid flights from around the world and speed relief to the impoverished Caribbean nation. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton headed to Port-au-Prince yesterday to meet with Haitian President Rene Preval at the airport. Her plane was to bring in supplies and return with evacuated Americans. "We will also be conveying very directly and personally to the Haitian people our long-term unwavering support, solidarity and sympathies," Clinton said. Trucks piled with corpses have been carrying bodies to hurriedly excavated mass graves outside the city, but thousands of bodies still are believed buried under rubble. "We have already collected around 50,000 dead bodies," Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime told reporters. "We anticipate there will be between 100,000 and 200,000 dead in total, although we will never know the exact number." Some 40,000 bodies had been buried in mass graves, said Secretary of State for Public Safety Aramick Louis. If the casualty figures turn out to be accurate, the 7.0 magnitude quake that hit Haiti on Tuesday and flattened much of its capital city would be one of the 10 deadliest ever. Health Minister Alex Larsen told reporters three-quarters of Port-au-Prince will have to be rebuilt. Three days after the earthquake struck, gangs of robbers had begun preying on survivors living in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies, as aftershocks rippled through the hilly neighbourhoods. Authorities reported some looting and growing anger among survivors despairing over the delay in life-saving assistance. Meanwhile, the US and other nations rushed to deliver food, water and medical supplies through a jammed airport, a smashed seaport and roads littered with rubble. Hungry residents fought each other for bags of foods handed out by UN trucks in downtown Port-au-Prince. A senior UN official warned that hunger will fuel trouble if aid does not arrive promptly.
