Aid Flown to Devastated Armenia

Relief planes from around the world rushed emergency supplies into Armenia today to help victims of an earthquake that left 400,000 people homeless, Tass press agency said. Armenian sources have said the death toll could reach 100,000.

A spokesman for Zvarnots Airport in the Armenian capital of Yerevan said planes arrived today from France, Belgium and Bulgaria and many more were expected. It was the first time disaster aid has reached the Soviet Union on such a scale.

Soviet officials still had released no death toll two days after Wednesday’s quake, but Rudolph Khochanov, an Armenian Foreign Ministry representative in Moscow, said up to 100,000 people were feared dead in the southern republic. Others today placed the figure at 80,000.

More Tremors Feared

A scientist predicted that more tremors would occur, and workers scrambled to find survivors buried in the rubble.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who cut short a trip to the United States and canceled plans to visit Cuba and Britain, arrived in Moscow before dawn, Tass said. He was expected to travel to Armenia, but officials refused to say exactly when.

Tass reported that a Swiss rescue team and 20 search dogs flew to Armenia with eight tons of rescue supplies. Swedish officials reported offering $1 million in rescue assistance, and Finland sent shipments of blood plasma.

President Reagan offered humanitarian aid, Cuban President Fidel Castro pledged to send construction workers, and Britain, France and Italy also dispatched rescue teams.

‘Totally Destroyed’

Leon Azruyan, an editor at the official Armenpress news agency in Yerevan, said he saw dozens of villages “totally destroyed.” In Spitak, a city of 16,000 near Leninakan, “99% of the population is gone,” he said.

“Helpless, sobbing people are climbing on the wreckage of an apartment house, from which can be heard heart-rending cries for help,” the Communist Party newspaper Pravda wrote from Leninakan, a heavily battered city near the quake’s epicenter.

U.S. scientists said the quake had a magnitude of 6.9.