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| October 25, 2005 | Tuesday | Ramzan 20, 1426 |
Tight security for US mobile hospital
MUZAFFARABAD, Oct 24: Law-enforcement agencies enforced a watertight security here on Monday when US soldiers arrived in the town in a 40-vehicle convoy to establish a mobile field-hospital to help earthquake victims in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Access to the new civil secretariat, legislative assembly and supreme and high court buildings was denied even to some government servants unable to prove their identity.
The hospital was set up in an open ground opposite the legislative assembly building.
The site was being used as helipad, mostly for VIP choppers. Accommodations for hospital staff were built at a lush-green lawn inside the new civil secretariat.
The 44-bed mobile army surgical hospital (or MASH unit), put together in Germany, has two operation theatres capable of performing 20 major operations a day. It would also offer other medical services.
According to army sources, three medical isolation units had to be left behind because the road leading to Kashmir is not wide enough to allow their transportation. However, they said, the MASH unit has a capacity for emergency care and operations.
The MASH unit, and about 100 of its total 200staffers, including 12 doctors and 32 nurses, had travelled aboard a commercial Boeing 757 jet to an army air base near Islamabad.
Three cargo flights with MASH personnel and equipment - including power generators and refrigerators - flew earlier in the week to Pakistan on a Russian commercial Illyushin-124 aircraft.
On Sunday, Gen John Abizaid, head of the Central Command, visited Muzaffarabad and vowed that the US would step up its relief efforts and send 11 more Chinook helicopters that would join 17 US choppers already flying missions into the quake hit region.
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