ESMAILABAD (Iran), June 22: A powerful earthquake in northern Iran killed at least 500 people and injured 2,000 on Saturday, razing dozens of mountain villages whose mud-brick homes crumbled to dust.

The death toll was set to rise, said the official IRNA news agency, with many people still trapped in rubble created in an instant by a quake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale.

Helicopters and rescue teams rushed to search for survivors in the grape-growing area around the epicentre Avaj, 200kms west of Tehran.

The quake struck in the early morning, just before 7.30am (9am PST), killing many women, children and elderly at home whilst men were out working in the fields and vineyards.

Villagers in Esmailabad, 10kms north of Avaj, recovered 38 bodies — one in nine of the population — and picked through the dusty ruins to look for more of the missing, feared trapped among the wooden roof joists that jutted into the air.

Mohsen, 12, is now alone — his three sisters, brother, mother, father and grandmother all died but he had set out for school. Wide-eyed, silent and shaking, he stood before the tangled rubble of his home nestled in the fertile mountains.

“I’ve lost everyone,” another man wailed as he poured earth over his head.

Maryam, a teenager, was lucky to survive. Her mother, sister and sister’s two children were crushed to death.

“The ground started to shake and we wanted to run away but we couldn’t,” she said. “They found me because my hand was sticking out of the rubble and pulled me out.”

One man and his wife fled their home just in time.

“We threw ourselves outside,” the man said, “and saw that instead of a village there was just dust.”

Women squatted in the dust, crying out as they rocked back and forth. A religious leader read a prayer for the dead laid out in the village square before relatives buried them on a hill.

IRNA said some 60 villages around Avaj had been razed to the ground or lost at least half of their buildings, with a pair of early strong aftershocks inflicting more damage.

A medical official in Qazvin, the regional centre, said 206 dead had been taken to one hospital in the city and 170 to another.

The town’s Red Crescent head said more than 500 people were now confirmed dead in the natural disaster.—Reuters