QUETTA, Pakistan, July 2, 2007 (AFP) - Floods unleashed by a tropical cyclone and a week of torrential rain have killed 110 people and affected 1.5 million in southern Pakistan, officials said Monday. Giant swathes of the normally desert southwestern province of Baluchistan remain under water following the impact of Cyclone Yemyin last Tuesday plus heavy monsoon rains over the weekend. Helicopters are still plucking survivors from their rooftops or dropping food to cut-off mud-brick villages, while other victims are living in camps, television footage showed. Provincial relief commissioner Khuda Bakhsh Baloch said flash floods at the weekend in Baluchistan's Khuzdar area killed at least 35 people, while other bodies had been found, bringing the toll for the week to at least 110. More than 200,000 are homeless and 1.5 million people in total are affected. "All these figures are likely to go up," Baloch said. "We don't know many people have been swept away and how many villages are wiped out. We have still not reached some far-flung areas." Police and senior relief officials said Sunday that the death toll was 60. Around 20 helicopters were engaged in relief and rescue operations while eight C-130 Hercules cargo planes were bringing in food, water, tents and medicines, Baloch said. Helicopters airlifted some 800 marooned people from different places and also supplied food to passengers stranded on roads and highways on Sunday, he added.

Meanwhile two people made homeless by floods died of snake bites in the neighbouring province of Sindh, where several inland areas have been completely cut off by floods, officials said. Thousands of villagers are marooned in parts of Larkhana, some 450 kilometres (280 miles) north of Karachi after a canal burst its banks, Sindh relief Commissioner Anwar Haider told AFP. "It's a bad situation. We have called the army for rescue operations but the water pressure coming from Baluchistan continued to increase," he said. More than 230 people were killed in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, on June 23 in a huge thunderstorm that hit days before the cyclone struck the Arabian Sea coast. About 40 people have also died in rain in northwestern Pakistan. Severe weather has now claimed about 600 lives across South Asia over the past fortnight, with pre-monsoon rains killing 144 people in India and nearly 60 dying in floods in Afghanistan. str-sz-mz/dk/adm