Algiers: Rescuers were on May 23 frantically searching for survivors amid mountains of rubble, after Algeria's worst earthquake in more than two decades killed more than 1,000 people and injured thousands more.

The powerful quake left a trail of widespread destruction in Algiers and several towns to the East of the capital.

Provisional figures from the Interior Ministry put the death toll at 1,092, with 6,782 injured. Hundreds of residents of Algiers and nearby towns and villages could not be accounted for.

The worst loss of life was recorded in the Boumerdes administrative region, 50 kms East of Algiers, where 624 people died, and in the Algiers district where 457 people lost their lives.

The toll is already the highest since the quake of 1980, which registered 7.5 on the open-ended Richter scale and killed 3,000 people.

In small coastal town of Boumerdes, the spectacle of the destruction caused by the quake was particularly shocking: dozens of once imposing buildings flattened as if they had been hit by steam hammers.

Armed with shovels and axes civil defence workers, conscripts, families of the missing and young volunteers appeared helpless when confronted with buildings that had collapsed in a matter of moments.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika visited the Boumerdes region and has decreed three days of national mourning.

Agencies