About 320,000 Pakistani villagers have been displaced by floods in the past 10 days and three people have been killed, but the worst appears over with water levels in main rivers falling, a relief official said. The death toll in the flooding, caused by heavy rain and snow melting in northern mountains, was low because of early warnings and smooth evacuations, said Mohammad Irfan Illahi, director-general of Punjab province's relief commission. "Most of the damage has been done to villages and crops on the river banks ... (but) since this morning, the floods have been falling," Illahi was quoted as saying by Reuters on Saturday. About 660 villages had been evacuated and about 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares) of farm land damaged, most of it sugar cane but including some cotton, one of Pakistan's most important crops, he said. Heavy winter snow melting in the Hindu Kush mountains and the Himalayas combined with heavy rain to send torrents of water down rivers such as the Indus and the Chenab into Pakistan's central plains. But Illahi said the surge of water had mostly passed down stream in the Indus and water levels were also falling in the Chenab, which flows into Pakistan from India.
