Protests in Pakistan as Storm/flood toll hits 500

TURBAT, Pakistan

Pakistani police fired tear gas to disperse a protest by some of the 1.1 million victims of a cyclone Friday, as fresh storms hit India and flooded villages awaiting help in Afghanistan.

About 500 people have now been killed by more than a week of severe weather that has swept across the coastlines, plains and mountains of South Asia with the approach of the annual summer monsoon.

In Pakistan, 1,000 protesters smashed up the mayor's office in the largely-submerged southwestern town of Turbat, saying they had received no relief goods since tropical Cyclone Yemyin struck on Tuesday.

Six people were wounded including the local police chief when police launched tear gas shells and fired live bullets in the air, an AFP photographer said.

"Our homes have been destroyed, there has been no drinking water and no food for the last four days. There is water everywhere," said farmer Ghulam Jan, 27.

Blazing sun scorched people still sheltering on the rooftops of houses and mosques after the rain stopped in Turbat, but helicopters bearing aid were again grounded because of continuing downpours elsewhere.

Khuda Bakhsh Baloch, the relief commissioner for Baluchistan province, said 1.1 million people were now known to have been affected by the cyclone. About 250,000 of them are homeless, while at least 21 have died.

"The situation is serious, we know that people are suffering," Baloch told AFP. "The more rain that comes, the worse it gets."

Devastating thunderstorms killed 235 people on Saturday in the sprawling southern port city of Karachi, hundreds of kilometres (miles) east of Turbat. Several more people are missing at sea.

Meanwhile along Pakistan's rugged northwestern border with Afghanistan at least 36 people died in rain-related accidents, federal relief chief Farooq Ahmed told a briefing.

Most of the dead in the area are Afghan refugees whose houses collapsed in Landikotal -- the main town in the semi-autonomous Khyber tribal district and the last before the famous Khyber Pass border crossing, officials said.

Another five people drowned when flood waters swept them away as they collected firewood in the Himalayan district of Diamer, police said...

In India, huge waves caused by a depression over the Bay of Bengal submerged at least two seaside villages in the eastern state of Orissa, affecting around 200 families, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

The waves up to 3.5 metres (12 feet) high also damaged a 1,200-year-old temple and a school, it said.

Monsoon rains claimed around 144 lives last weekend in western and southern India. The area suffered heavy downpours and flash floods.

However the Indian meteorological department said on Friday that this year's monsoon, which is crucial for hundreds of millions of farmers -- would deliver less rain than previously forecast -- 93 percent of the normal rainfall.