Tajikistan Mud Slide Kills Six Children

Six children were killed when a mud slide engulfed houses in a mountain village in Tajikistan, and at least seven others are missing, a government spokesman said Sunday.

Orif Nozimov said emergency workers had pulled the children's bodies from the mud and were still searching for seven other people thought to have been in the houses when they were buried on Saturday.

"Several houses ended up under the mud," Nozimov told Agence France Presse. "Today by noon, we managed to dig out the bodies of six children."

The disaster occurred in a village in the Shuroabad region bordering Afghanistan.

Tajikistan is the poorest country to emerge from the former Soviet Union. More than 90 percent of its territory is mountainous.