Aftershocks Rock Iran; Toll Mounts : Disaster: Main quake killed 40,000, some officials say. Town of Roudbar, center of devastation, is flattened and nearly lifeless.

Strong aftershocks sent panicked residents rushing into the streets of northern Iran on Saturday, and mass graves were dug for victims of a massive earthquake that some officials say killed at least 40,000 people.

Officials estimated that at least 10,000 people died here in Roudbar alone. Roudbar is a mountain town on the banks of the Safid River, and it had a population of about 20,000 before Thursday morning’s disaster crushed it flat and left it appearing nearly lifeless.

Rescuers were still lifting the limp, battered bodies from the rubble Saturday night.

An old woman named Zenab Zohori sat cross-legged on the edge of a perimeter road here, her body formless with grief.

“My brother is dead,” she moaned. “His children are dead. Everyone is dead. My husband’s back is broken. I don’t know where they have taken him.”

A few hundred feet down the road, a family of eight huddled together and wept.

A few hundred feet farther along, a crowd gasped as searchers discovered the body of a girl, about 9 years old, under a pile of mud bricks that once formed the front wall of her home.

In Roudbar and surrounding villages slammed by the devastating quake and 200 aftershocks, 90% of the buildings were destroyed. The cities looked as though they had been shaken and shifted by a giant hand until they crumbled like sand castles.

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported that, with the lapse of time, hope is fading that more survivors can be found alive under the rubble of the devastated region on the Caspian Sea. The temblor, rated at a magnitude of 7.3 to 7.7, destroyed dozens of towns and villages.

It was Iran’s worst earthquake in this century and the world’s worst since 1976, when a quake in Tangshan, China, killed about 242,000.

Numerous mountain villages remained cut off because landslides blocked roads. Medical teams entered other towns to help control the spread of disease.

After the crowd removed the bricks from the girl’s lifeless form here in Roudbar, carefully masking their faces with handkerchiefs to block out the stench, they wrapped her in a blanket and softly chanted Muslim prayers as they carried her away. Despite a huge presence of rescue workers, both Iranian and international, in this stricken city, there was a shortage of stretchers.

Gravedigger Asghar Sharif said that every body had its own grave, in keeping with Muslim tradition. But the number of bodies was so great, he said, that he and the other diggers dug graves three at a time and then separated them with small wooden partitions.

Thanks to a remarkable rescue-and-relief effort by the Iranians and foreign helpers, most of the survivors appeared to have shelter and food. As foreign journalists surveyed the damage from an Iranian air force helicopter, they could see troops of French rescue teams in bright orange jumpsuits patrolling the roads.

International frictions were suspended for this giant rescue effort.

At dusk Saturday in one of the rescue camps, two French national firefighters, one wearing a flat-top kepi cap, stood chatting casually. Even American journalists were welcomed warmly by Iranian officials.

The U.S. government was airlifting blankets, tents, water jugs and other relief supplies to Iran. French and Soviet relief teams arrived, and the Vatican and nations worldwide sent relief donations.

In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Morteza Sarmadi denied what he said were foreign media reports that Iran is not allowing international medical and relief teams into the stricken areas.

Sarmadi told IRNA that “in view of the devastation wrought by the earthquake” Iran welcomes relief teams, equipment, hospital supplies and medicine.

There was already talk Saturday that one of the legacies of the disaster might be the warming of relations between the Western nations and the hostile Tehran regime.

By accepting U.S. aid, for example, the Iranians demonstrated that some of their leaders had rejected the “great Satan” view of America espoused by the late Iranian revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A key figure in the policy on foreign disaster relief is Hussein Mousavian, whose title is director general for Western Europe in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but who many people believe is behind a form of Iranian glasnost reflected in the openness to foreign disaster relief.

“The Iranian government has decided to accept aid from everywhere except Israel and South Africa,” said one official. The willingness to accept a wide range of help from the United States and Britain indicated some progress, according to one professional Iranian journalist who asked not to be named.

There were conflicting versions of the death toll in the disaster. Hussein Zeineddin, second secretary with Iran’s U.N. Mission in New York, said late Friday that according to the latest estimates, at least 40,000 people were killed and 100,000 were injured. IRNA, the official news agency, reported nearly 29,000 people killed.

The biggest of the more than 200 aftershocks that have hit the region had a magnitude of 4.2, the news agency said.

Another large shock jolted the northern city of Rasht early Saturday, “making panic-stricken residents take to the streets,” IRNA said. There was also a third powerful aftershock.

“Aftershocks, which continue in the mountainous areas, are endangering the relief operation,” IRNA added.

The toll surpassed a quake that killed 25,000 people in nearby Soviet Armenia in December, 1988, and a 7.7 quake in Iran in 1978 that also killed 25,000. It was the worst previous quake in Iran in this century.

“Our people have learned to resist difficulties, and consider the national disaster to be a divine test,” President Hashemi Rafsanjani told Syria’s foreign minister, Farouk Shareh.

“We have submitted ourselves to God’s will.”

Iranian officials said Rafsanjani has taken personal charge of relief operations, and Muslim leaders from around the country organized small armies of volunteers to help.

As viewed from an American-built Chinook helicopter carrying 40 foreign journalists, the natural beauty of Zanjan province, 100 miles northwest of Tehran, contrasted with the grim scenes in the devastated cities of Roudbar and its neighbor, Manjil.

Hawks hovered over golden fields of wheat. A solitary turquoise-roofed mosque stood vigil on a hilltop. Each mud-walled mountain village had its own fruit orchard.

But as the helicopter coursed along the Safid River, the devastation of the earthquake became more and more intense. Village after village was leveled. Escarpments were crumbled and cracked, leaving jagged boulders at their base. A village of 20 houses was completely leveled, looking like an old archeological dig.

The city of Manjil, very near the epicenter of the earthquake, was without one standing building. Clumps of families, chickens and gamboling goats camped at the edge of their former abodes in Iranian Red Crescent tents. Miraculously, a major concrete dam between Manjil and Roudbar remained intact, with white water pouring through one of its floodgates. If the large dam had broken, several villages at its base would have been submerged.

For American journalists, who in recent times have been kept from traveling freely in Iran, it was also an opportunity to look at the country more than 10 years after the Iranian revolution.

In fact, some of the infrastructure looked brand-new. A recently finished, major six-lane highway between Tehran and the ancient Iranian capital of Qazvin was smooth sailing. Even the immense, luxury apartment complex near the airport that was started by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi--who was deposed in 1979--was near completion.

However, some things remained the same. In the lobby of the former American Inter-Continental Hotel was a carefully crafted wall hanging that said in English: “Down with U.S.A.”

WHERE TO SEND AID Here are some of the agencies accepting donations for Iranian earthquake victims: Adventist Development and Relief Agency

12501 Old Columbia Pike

Silver Spring, Md. 20904

(301) 680-6380

American Jewish World Service

1290 Avenue of the Americas

11th Floor

New York, N.Y. 10104

American Red Cross

Iran Earthquake Disaster

P.O. Box 37243

Washington, D.C. 20013

(800) 842-2200

American Red Cross (local)

2700 Wilshire Blvd.,

Los Angeles, Calif. 90057

AmeriCares

161 Cherry St.

New Canaan, Conn. 06840

(800) 486-HELP

Bank Melli Iran

Iran Quake Relief Assistance

Account No. 5000

628 Madison Ave.

New York, N.Y. 10022

Bank Melli Iran (local)

818 Wilshire Blvd.

Los Angeles, Calif. 90017

Baptist World Alliance

Iran Earthquake Fund

6733 Curran St.

McLean, Va. 22101

Catholic Relief Services

209 W. Fayette St.

Baltimore, Md. 21208

(301) 625-2220

Church World Service

Iran Emergency

P.O. Box 968

Elkhart, Ind. 46515

(212) 870-3151

Direct Relief International

2801-B De La Vina St.

Santa Barbara, Calif. 93105

(805) 687-3694

Lutheran World Relief

390 Park Ave. S.

New York, N.Y. 10016

Operation California / USA

7615 1/2 Melrose Ave.

Los Angeles, Calif. 90046

U.S. Committee for UNICEF

333 E. 38th St.

New York, N.Y. 10016

(212) 686-5522

World Concern

P.O. Box 33000

Seattle, Wash. 98133

World Vision

919 W. Huntington Drive

Monrovia, Calif. 91016

(818) 357-7979