Police arrest dozens for looting abandoned houses in earthquake

Kathmandu: Police have arrested dozens of people on suspicion of looting abandoned homes as well as causing panic by spreading rumors of another big quake.
Police official Bigyan Raj Sharma says 27 have been detained for stealing from homes whose owners moved out following Saturday’s quake and powerful aftershocks.

The aftershocks have waned but people are still anxious, many preferring to stay out in the open. Sharma says another four people were arrested for spreading false rumors of an impending quake through social media and text messages. The first aid shipments have reached Dhading district, close to the epicenter of the devastating earthquake in Nepal.

U.N. food agency emergency officer Geoff Pinnock says the distribution in remote quake-hit villages will start soon, but cautions it would take time. “Remember Katrina. It doesn’t happen overnight,” he said. In Gorkha, the neighboring district to the west, five cargo trucks filled with rice, cooking oil and sugar stood on a grassy field in Majuwa village waiting for a helicopter from Kathmandu to take the supplies to the hardest-hit areas of that district.

The World Food Programme also expects the delivery of high-energy biscuits, which will be send out to areas without enough water for cooking. Meanwhile, a man pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Kathmandu more than three days after the deadly Nepal earthquake says he drank his own urine to survive.

Rishi Khanal said that he had given up all hope of rescue as his lips cracked and his nails turned white. There were dead bodies around him and a terrible smell. But he kept banging on the rubble all around him and eventually this brought a French rescue team that extracted him after an operation lasting many hours.

He is now being treated for leg injuries at a hospital in the capital the day after French rescuers found him and brought him out from a collapsed hotel. He had been buried for 82 hours. While many villages are still waiting for rescue and relief teams, life in the capital, Kathmandu, is slowly returning to normal.