From Birmingham to Kashmir, 'because the people are my brothers'

For the past four nights he slept rough with the survivors. On Wednesday, he helped dig six children out of the ruins of a school, but they were already dead.

"Some of them had been hiding under the desks," he said. "To see that, well, I'm a brave guy but it made me cry. The people here are so tough. If it was my child, I couldn't take it. But they're pulling together."

For Mr Khan, 39, to leave his job in Birmingham is no mean matter. Although he is originally from Kashmir, his family moved to the UK when he was four, and he has no relatives in Kashmir today. "I came because these people are my brother Kashmiris," he said, in a heavy Birmingham accent. "When you see those pictures on TV, children and men and women dying, you know you have to come."

He is staying under atrocious conditions. All the buildings in the village just outside Muzaffarabad have collapsed. The stench of decaying bodies still under the rubble is everywhere. Survivors and volunteers are camped together in a muddy field next to the ruins.

Mr Khan is part of a tide of thousands of volunteers who have come to the affected areas from all over Pakistan, and further afield. But, as Mr Khan ruefully observed, the volunteers cannot make up for the inadequacy of the government relief effort.

"The government is doing nothing here," he says. "If this were the UK, Tony Blair would never get away with it. It's taken them so long to get the basic needs here. People have died because help didn't get here in time."

He points to the mountains. "There are villages up there where help still isn't getting through because they haven't cleared the landslides from the road. In the UK we'd have had them cleared in a few days. All this aid that's coming through now, where's it going?

"There's a lot of anger among the people here at the government. There's a feeling that Pakistan talks a lot about Kashmir but is doing nothing for it when it needs help."

Mr Khan asks the Kashmiris gathered around what they think about President Pervez Musharraf. They are silent, grim-faced. They gesture as if to say there are still red lines in Pakistan.

"There's your answer," says Mr Khan. "But the reaction from the people has been amazing," he says. "I can't believe the distances people have come from."

When he got here from Britain, Mr Khan went to his ancestral home of Mirapur, in the south of Kashmir, which was not badly affected. He joined a convoy of volunteers heading north to Islamabad with a truck full of food, medicine, tents and blankets.

"We hired the truck," he said. "People in the community have all helped. They've lent pick-up trucks, donated aid. We've got no organisation; we don't need an organisation.

"We've been wearing the same clothes for six days now, on the road and then here. We've been sleeping in the open for four days but I don't care."

Mr Khan and his friends from Mirapur will soon to be heading out. They have distributed all the aid they brought, and were heading back to Mirapur. They plan to come back as soon as the truck is filled.