An AFP journalist at the scene said cars and trucks loaded with piles of bodies were flowing into the cemetery of the stricken town of Bora, southeast of Bam.

Many corpses were abandoned in a corner of the cemetery, with grave diggers overwhelmed by the rush.

A father was seen carrying his two children, aged three and seven, ready to bury them with their clothes still on, without having first washed the bodies in keeping with Islamic customs.

Friday's quake which hit southeast Iran left 20,000 people dead and 30,000 injured, according to a provisional toll issued by the interior ministry, Iranian state television reported.

But the toll is expected to rise much higher, Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mussavi Lari said.

"We project the scale of the catastrophe being even greater and the number of victims being much higher than has been announced," the minister told state radio.

Dozens of Iranian military planes have been mobilised to evacuate the wounded from the earthquake-hit zone of Bam to hospitals in Tehran and other cities.

Several aircraft ferried in hundreds of wounded from Bam to the capital's airport, from where they were being transferred with the help of soldiers to a fleet of ambulances headed for Tehran hospitals.

Natives of Bam, meanwhile, were frantically trying to find seats on any flights bound for the region to search for relatives.

Rescue work official Mohammad Jahanshahi told the official news agency IRNA: "We urgently need body bags. When daybreak comes, thousands of bodies will be pulled from the ruins and we have an immediate need for bags to transport the bodies."

Twelve sniffer dogs were sent into Bam to try and locate survivors under the rubble.

Swiss rescue teams arrived early Saturday in Kerman with more dogs and were to continue immediately to Bam, Iranian television reported from Kerman, the provincial capital.

The temperature dropped to below freezing overnight in Bam, making it unlikely that survivors would still be found in the ruins.

The first planes bringing foreign rescuers to help Iran arrived early Saturday in Kerman, the local provincial governor's office said, quoted by

Apart from Switzerland, the planes were also from Britain, Germany and Russia, it said.

Earlier Iran said it would accept aid from all foreign countries except Israel in dealing with the quake.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran accepts all kinds of humanitarian aid from all countries and international organizations with the exception of the Zionist regime" (Israel), interior ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani was quoted as saying by IRNA.

The United States, Iran's arch-foe, was not mentioned.

US President George W. Bush said Friday he was "greatly saddened" by the massive earthquake and offered humanitarian aid. "We stand ready to help the people of Iran," he said.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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