About a fifth of the villages in the quake zone remained cut off eight days after the tremor turned villages scattered across lush mountainsides into death traps, and the bad weather over Kashmir halted aid flights by helicopters.
Central government officials in Islamabad said early in the day that confirmed casualties totaled 39,422 dead and 65,038 injured for all of Pakistan, including more than 13,000 killed in North West Frontier Province. About 1,350 deaths were reported in India's part of Kashmir, for a total of just under 41,000.
But a spokesman for the state government chief in the Pakistani portion of Kashmir, which suffered the worst quake damage, said later that officials thought the death toll would rise rapidly as teams search more debris.
''The death toll is not less than 40,000" in just Pakistani Kashmir, said Abdul Khaliq Wasi, a spokesman for Sikandar Hayat Khan. He stressed that number was only ''a closest estimate" and did not reflect the number of bodies recovered.
Khan, the Kashmiri prime minister, gave a worse prediction to Pakistan's Geo television. ''Some people fear that the death toll could be 100,000, and they may be right," he said.
A precise death toll will be difficult to determine because many bodies are buried under collapsed buildings and landslides.
''The United Nations is still operating on the government's official numbers," said Andrew MacLeod, Humanitarian Affairs officer with the UN Coordination and Assessment Team. ''There are regions that still have not been reached, and the death toll is not final."
There was confusion about reports of soldiers rescuing a young girl from the rubble of her home yesterday.
The army spokesman, Major General Shaukat Sultan, said a polio-stricken girl was pulled from her flattened home in a village near Balakot. But army Major Majid Jahangir in Balakot said the girl, described as 10 or 11, only had been unable to walk and was carried from the village by soldiers.
