The death toll from the disaster has hit 7,040, according to the Emergency Operations Centre, with more than 14,000 injured. More than 100 were also killed in India and China.
A Nepali police team in an avalanche hit area in the northern district of Rasuwa pulled out bodies of about 50 people, including some foreign trekkers.
Uddav Prasad Bhattarai, chief officer of Rasuwa district that forms part of Langtang, said the bodies had been found in different places, including buried under debris, in recent days in the region hit by a quake-triggered avalanche.
"We have pulled out 51 bodies from the Langtang area so far, six of them are tourists. We estimate that about 100 foreigners might still be missing in the area," Bhattarai said.
"Our priority was to get the survivors out. We rescued over 350 people, about a half of them were tourists or guides," he told AFP in Rasuwa north of Kathmandu
"We believe we have rescued most of the survivors now. We will now bring down the dead bodies."
Tourism department chief Tulsi Gautam said Sunday that so far the bodies of 54 foreigners have been recovered nationwide.
EU diplomats said on Friday that around 1,000 European citizens were still unaccounted for in Nepal, although many of those were thought to be safe but out of contact.
The Europeans had mostly been climbing in the Everest region or trekking in the remote Langtang range in the Himalayas near the quake epicenter.
One Israeli, Or Asraf, also remains unaccounted for, with his family urging rescuers to increase their efforts.
Although multiple teams of rescuers from more than 20 countries have been using sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment to find survivors in the rubble, noone has been pulled out alive since Thursday evening.
"Rescue operations are still under way, but focus has shifted to providing relief," home ministry spokesman Laxmi Prasad Dhakal told AFP on Sunday.
"Many far flung villages have been affected," he said, adding that there was still an "acute shortage" of tents for the hundreds of thousands left homeless.
The manager of Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport said very heavy planes were being barred from landing because of concerns about the condition of the single runway after the quake and a series of strong aftershocks.
"We have issued a notice saying that aircraft with a total weight exceeding 196 tonnes will not be allowed to land at Kathmandu airport," Birendra Prasad Shrestha told AFP.
"There are no visible cracks in the runway but there have been so many tremors recently that we have to take precautions - we don't know what's happening below the surface.
"This runway is the only lifeline for Kathmandu -- if it goes, everything goes."
The exact scale of the disaster was still to emerge, with the mountainous terrain in the vast Himalayan nation complicating the relief effort.
With relief workers still to reach many areas, the Red Cross has warned of "total devastation" in far-flung areas, including in the hardest-hit Sindhupalchowk region, northeast of Kathmandu, where whole villages have been destroyed.
The latest UN's situation report says teams that have arrived in another devastated district, Gorkha, have discovered a "dire need for shelter, particularly tents and blankets".
"Access to some remote villages remains a key challenge as many landing zones are unsafe due to debris, altitude and current weather conditions," the report also says.
"Road access is limited. Some remote villages can only be accessed by helicopters."
Sunday 3 May 2015
http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/asia-pacific/69818-150503-death-toll-from-nepal-s-devastating-quake-passes-7-000-official
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