Volunteers Help Bury Victims in Bangladesh

An army of Red Cross volunteers helped bury thousands of rotting corpses and animal carcasses Wednesday as the death toll rose from a tornado and flash floods that wreaked more havoc on cyclone-devastated Bangladesh.

Nine days after a cyclone killed at least 125,000 people, 40 were reported dead and more than 400 injured after the tornado lashed 20 villages Tuesday night in the industrial district of Gazipur north of Dhaka with 100-m.p.h. winds, an official said Wednesday.

In yet another disaster, flash floods swept across at least 50 square miles of the Sylhet region in the northeast, drowning two boys, when three rivers burst their banks after heavy rains Tuesday.

Corpses and carcasses rotting in the tropical sun are posing a cholera threat, aid workers said. But the Red Cross said there have been no confirmed cases of cholera.

The death toll from the cyclone stands at 125,730, but that figure does not include thousands of others still missing, said Denis McClean, spokesman for the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

More than 900,000 cattle were also killed in the disaster.

McClean said 20,000 Red Cross volunteers are helping to bury the dead. Still, “burial of the dead people and animals is not taking place quickly enough to avoid disease in the Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar areas,” CARE said in statement Wednesday.

More than 75,000 people were reported killed in those two areas.

Bangladesh, one of the world’s five poorest countries, has appealed for $1.4 billion in relief and reconstruction aid from abroad.

Donor countries have so far pledged aid of about $310 million, including $200 million from Japan and $106 million from Saudi Arabia, officials said.

The government appealed Wednesday to foreign countries for more helicopters to augment its efforts to get food, medicine and clothing to survivors.

“We have at the moment 13 helicopters, and these are going to far-flung areas,” Information Secretary Manzur-e-Moula told a news conference.

He said that Bangladeshi air force helicopters, along with three from India and two from Pakistan, made a total of 19 relief flights Wednesday to southern and southeastern Bangladesh, which took the full force of the cyclone.