ashmir and North West Frontier Province bore the brunt of the earthquake's power and the jump in the toll came after confirmation of more fatalities from remote mountain valleys and the town of Balakot.

Relief flights in and out of Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, were severely disrupted on Saturday by rain. A few helicopters managed to take off from a makeshift landing pad in a sports field.

Musharraf was unsure whether the Pakistan Army rescue teams had reached all the affected areas and he expected the number of confirmed dead to increase once routes into the Jhelum and Neelum valleys were cleared of landslides.

Another 1,300 people are confirmed dead in Indian Kashmir.

Some 3,000 Muslim faithful gathered in Pakistan's largest mosque, Shah Faisal in Islamabad, for a prayer session at the time of the quake just before 9 a.m. (5 a.m. British time) on October 8.

"Oh Allah give courage to those who survived this disaster to endure this hardship," the cleric prayed, his voice breaking with sobs as he called Pakistanis who died in the quake martyrs.

It is Ramadan in Pakistan, a holy month of prayer which also dictates fasting from dawn to dusk.

The 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck just outside Muzaffarabad, a city of 70,000 people 100 km (65 miles) northeast of Islamabad, at the foothills of the Himalayas, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.

The rise in the death toll puts the earthquake on the same massive scale of destruction as the Quetta quake of 1935.

Between 30,000 and 60,000 people are estimated to have died in the Quetta quake, which almost destroyed the city completely, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, killed 31,000 people.

The overwhelming concern as relief operations moved from rescue to rehabilitation was the potentially deadly combination of bad weather and no real shelter. The United Nations estimates more than a million have been made homeless - as many as 2.5 million by local counts - and winter is approaching rapidly.

Tent Cities

In lieu of organised camps, tent cities sprung up in Muzaffarabad made up of plastic awnings, old signboards and a few real tents. Refugees burn wood from the rubble still wet from the rain, plastic bags and bottles or even donated clothing - whatever they can find to keep warm and cook.

"It is very difficult. My children are crying all the time," said Nasreen Ikram, her daughter by her side chanting softly "Allah, Allah" (God).

The smell of burning plastic hung in the air of Ikram's camp, housing some 2,000 people, along with the stench of dead bodies still entombed in rubble.

With chances of finding anyone to rescue fading fast, some international rescue teams had begun to leave.

Musharraf said rescue work would continue, although experts suggest it would be a miracle if anyone survived for eight days.

Thirty people, including foreigners, remain unaccounted for in Islamabad's Margala Towers apartment block, the capital's only significant damage, and British rescuers were working there in the hope of finding more people alive.

Thunder and lightning rolled through mountains around Muzaffarabad on Saturday and dark clouds hung low over the city.

The 48-hour weather forecast for the region was for isolated thunderstorms followed by a cold snap that will bring night-time temperatures to as low as three degrees Centigrade (37 degrees Fahrenheit).

Strong aftershocks have sent nervous residents of ruined mountain towns running into streets in the middle of the night.

Meteorological officials said seismic activity was likely to continue for months, maybe years.

Global Response

About $350 million (198 million pounds) in international aid has been pledged and more than $38 million has been raised domestically.

But United Nations chief emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland has called for a more urgent world aid response. He said there was still an acute shortage of helicopters and about three times as many were needed.

"This is a very major earthquake but it's really aggravated a thousand times by the topography," he told Reuters. "An earthquake is bad anywhere, in the Himalayas it becomes much worse."

The aid effort has picked up steam in recent days after a difficult start due to a shortage of helicopters needed to reach remote mountain towns and roads blocked by landslides.

Where valleys are too narrow and steep-sided for helicopters, mule-trains are being sent to carry in the food, blankets and tents people need to survive.

The tragedy has straddled the divide between Pakistani and Indian Kashmir that dates back to independence from British colonial rule in 1947 and over which Pakistan and India have fought two of their three wars.

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