Over 2,000 people buried in landslide in Papua New Guinea

More than 2,000 people are feared buried in a Papua New Guinea landslide that destroyed a remote highland village, the government said Monday, as it pleaded for international help in the rescue effort.

The once-bustling hillside community in Enga province was almost wiped out when a chunk of Mount Mungalo collapsed in the early hours of Friday morning, smothering scores of homes and the people sleeping inside them.

"The landslide buried more than 2,000 people alive and caused major destruction to buildings, food gardens and caused major impact on the economic lifeline of the country," Papua New Guinea's national disaster centre said in a letter to the UN, reports AFP.

The main highway to the large Porgera gold mine was "completely blocked", it told the UN resident coordinator's office in the capital Port Moresby.

The landslip was continuing to "shift slowly, posing ongoing danger to both the rescue teams and survivors alike", the disaster centre said.

The scale of the catastrophe required "immediate and collaborative actions from all players", it added, including the army, and national and provincial responders.

The centre also called on the United Nations to inform Papua New Guinea's development partners "and other international friends" of the crisis.

The UN is scheduled to hold an online emergency meeting with foreign governments early Tuesday.

They will try to coordinate a relief effort that has been complicated by the remoteness of the site--which is situated in Papua New Guinea's rugged highlands--as well as the severed road link and ongoing tribal fighting nearby.

Locals and rescue teams have been using shovels and pieces of wood to find bodies under the landslide--a mix of car-sized boulders, uprooted trees and churned-up earth that is thought to be up to eight metres (26 feet) deep.

"Nobody escaped. We don't know who died because records are buried," a schoolteacher from a neighbouring village, Jacob Sowai, told the media.