AP
 
Quetta, Oct 29: An official says the death toll from the earthquake in southwestern Pakistan has risen to 135. 

A mayor in the area, Dilawar Kakar, says 135 deaths have been confirmed and that the figure will likely rise as rescuers reach remote villages.

Kakar said hundreds more have been injured and some 15,000 people left homeless and appealed for help.

The strong earthquake also destroyed hundreds of mud houses on Wednesday, officials said. 

The death toll was expected to rise as reports arrived from remote areas of the affected province of Baluchistan, an impoverished area bordering Afghanistan.

``It will be much more,'' Sohail ur Rahman, a top civilian official in one of Baluchistan's districts, told Dawn News TV station.

The worst-hit area appeared to be Ziarat, where hundreds of mostly mud and timber houses had been destroyed in five villages, Mayor Dilawar Kakar said. Some houses had been buried in a landslide triggered by the quake, he said.

A reporter for AP Television News saw dozens of bodies and injured in a hospital in Kawas in Ziarat district. A doctor there, Mohammed Irfan, said the hospital was unable to cope with the injured it was receiving.

Zamaruk Khan, the minister for revenue and rehabilitation, told The Associated Press ``more than 100'' people had been killed. Kakar said about 120 people had been injured.

``Rescue work is being carried out by the villagers themselves, but a larger operation is needed here,'' Kakar said.

The army said it was rushing medical teams on helicopters to villages in the quake zone.

The quake struck two hours before dawn and had a preliminary magnitude of 6.4, the US Geological Survey reported. It was a shallow 10 miles (15 kilometers) below the surface.

It was centered about 400 miles (640 kilometers) southwest of the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan is prone to violent seismic upheavals. Wednesday's quake was the deadliest since a magnitude-7.6 quake devastated Kashmir and northern Pakistan in October 2005, killing about 80,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Baluchistan is home to a long-running separatist movement, but is not considered a major battleground in the fight against Taliban insurgents that plague other border regions.