Nepal's customs delaying aid to victims: UN

Bureaucracy at Kathmandu airport was holding up vital relief supplies for survivors of the earthquake in Nepal on Saturday as the death toll from the disaster passed 6,600.

UN Resident Representative Jamie McGoldrick said the government must loosen customs restrictions to deal with the increasing flow of relief material and avoid bottlenecks.

Material was piling up at the Kathmandu airport instead of being ferried out to victims, McGoldrick told Reuters.

"They should not be using peacetime customs methodology," he said.

Nepal exempted tarpaulins and tents from import taxes on Friday but a home ministry spokesman, Laxmi Prasad Dhakal, said all goods coming in from overseas had to be inspected.

Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat on Friday had appealed to international donors to send tents, tarpaulins and basic food supplies and said some of the items received were of no use.

Nepali government officials have said efforts to step up the pace of delivery of relief material to remote areas were also frustrated by a shortage of supply trucks and drivers.

One thousand EU citizens are still unaccounted for in Nepal, diplomats said Friday.

The Europeans had mostly been climbing in the avalanche-hit Everest region and trekking in the remote Langtang range in the Himalayas near the epicentre of the quake that ripped up infrastructure and left tens of thousands homeless.

Another EU official said on condition of anonymity that the majority were likely to be found safe, but given the difficulty of the terrain and poor communications, their whereabouts were currently unknown.