Summary Rescue efforts have been hampered by difficult conditions due to a week of heavy rain.
(Reuters) - More than 2,100 are confirmed to have been killed after a landslide crashed into a remote mountain village in northeast Afghanistan, a spokesman for the provincial governor said on Saturday.
"More then 2,100 people from 300 families are all dead," Naweed Forotan, a spokesman for the Badakhshan provincial governor, told Reuters.
The United Nations said the focus was now on the more than 4,000 displaced by Friday's disaster. There is a risk of further landslides in the area, officials say.
Villagers dug with their bare hands to try to find survivors under the mountain of mud, but officials said there was little hope of finding anyone alive given the scale of the disaster.
Triggered by heavy rain, the side of a mountain collapsed into the village in Argo district at around 11 a.m. (2.30 a.m. ET) as people were trying to recover their belongings and livestock after a smaller landslip hit their homes a few hours earlier.
Rescue efforts have been hampered by difficult conditions due to a week of heavy rain.
Seasonal rains and spring snow melt have caused heavy destruction across large swathes of northern Afghanistan, killing more than 100 people.
