Typhoon Haiyan Survivors' Fear And Desperation

Gunshots have reportedly forced the delay of a mass burial of victims of the huge typhoon that smashed into the Philippines.

The mayor of Tacloban, the provincial capital of Leyte province where 16ft waves flattened nearly everything in their path, made the claim on Wednesday.

Soldiers carry young children on to evacuation flights at Tacloban airport

Alfred Romualdez said: "We had finished digging the mass burial site. We had the truck loaded with bodies but there was some shooting. They could not proceed."

Locals in Tacloban also reported seeing members of the army firing guns, as well as armed civilians in the street.

An injured typhoon survivor is carried by members of the military

Meanwhile it has been reported that a 13-year-old boy who was walking alone through the city at night was slashed across the neck and stabbed in the stomach.

Jonathan Salayco said he was attacked by two men he did not know late on Tuesday, who then disappeared without a trace.

Red Cross nurse Mina Joset said: "He was still holding his toy car.

The remains of an orphanage

"For a boy like him, this is a serious injury."

Five days after Typhoon Haiyan ripped apart entire coastal communities, the situation in Tacloban is becoming ever more dire with essential supplies low and increasingly desperate survivors jostling for aid.

Eight people were crushed to death after a huge crowd of typhoon survivors rushed a government rice warehouse, causing a wall to collapse.

Supplies of rice are loaded on to a truck, but food remains scarce

The incident in Alangalang town, 10 miles from Tacloban, underlined the increasing sense of fear and desperation setting in among those battling to survive the aftermath of the typhoon.

Sky News Asia Correspondent Mark Stone said: "Those who survived desperately need help. There is nothing like enough supplies or aid here and there is a depressing lack of co-ordination."

The Disasters Emergency Committee appeal has reached £13m just 24 hours after it was launched, it was announced on Wednesday.

Tacloban's infrastructure was devastated by the typhoon's impact

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos has praised the international community's reaction but said much more needed to be done in a disaster of such magnitude.

The international relief effort is building momentum with many countries pledging help. The United States and Britain are sending warships carrying thousands of sailors to the Philippines.

The aircraft carrier USS George Washington, which has 5,000 sailors and more than 80 aircraft on board, is heading from Hong Kong with five other US warships, while three amphibious vessels are also being deployed.

A sense of fear and desperation is growing in the stricken city

The carrier group is expected to reach the Philippines later this week, the Pentagon said, bringing much needed supplies.

The UK's first flight delivering urgently needed humanitarian aid has now arrived, the Government has said.

A chartered Boeing 777 carrying 8,836 shelter kits from UK Government stores in Dubai landed in the city of Cebu and was met by Department for International Development (DFID) humanitarian workers.

A school in Cebu was reduced to rubble

President Aquino has declared a "state of national calamity", allowing the government to impose price controls and quickly release emergency funds.

The latest official government death toll stands at 1,798, although authorities have said they have not come close to accurately assessing the number of bodies lying amid the rubble or swept out to sea.

Health Secretary Enrique Ona admitted authorities were struggling to deal with the sheer numbers of the dead.

He told radio station DZMM they had delayed the retrieval of bodies because "we ran out of body bags".

He said: "We hope to speed it up when we get more body bags."

The UN estimates more than 11.3 million people have been affected with 673,000 made homeless, since Haiyan smashed into the nation's central islands on Friday.

Haiyan's sustained winds when it hit Samar island, where it first made landfall, reached 195 miles an hour, making it the strongest typhoon in the world this year and one of the most powerful ever recorded.

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