India, April 4 -- For some agonising minutes after the wall collapsed, Mohibullah Niazi could hear their screams. Then there was silence. Eight members of a refugee family, who had returned to Afghanistan just a fortnight ago from war-hit Iran, were killed when a 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck near Kabul late on Friday night.

The tremor toppled a rain-softened wall directly onto the tent where they slept.

The sole survivor was a boy around three years old, identified as Aarash, who was pulled injured from the rubble and rushed to hospital in Kabul.

The Taliban regime's health ministry spokesman Sharafat Zaman, who visited the child on Saturday, said he was being treated for a severe head injury.

Niazi, a neighbour who joined the resc...