People were too scared to sleep in their houses during the night

"Living here risks the lives of my wife and children but we have nowhere else to go," said Sadek Bouraoui, who brought a mattress onto the street.

"Most of the people have moved out of their houses. They're scared there will be another earthquake," one resident told the BBC.

Rescue services are overwhelmed as bodies are piling up at morgues; more than 1,000 people were killed in the earthquake.

In Roiba, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) east of the capital, Algiers, a three-storey apartment was reduced to rubble, burying many.

"It is catastrophic. I have never seen such a disaster in my life. Everything has collapsed," said Yazid Khelfaoui, who lost his mother.

Icham Mouiss told a French television station: "I saw the earth tremble. I saw people jump from the window of the hotel."

In some cases, shock, fear and grief are turning into anger.

Boumerdes is one of the worst-hit areas

"This building went up less than two years ago. It's corruption that brought it down," a student named Abelzek told the French news agency AFP.

"The realtors are all crooks. If you see the buildings that date to the French colonial period, some of them are 150 years old. They didn't budge," said a taxi driver from Boumerdes, located 50 km from the capital Algiers.

"Others moved here from the casbah. Their buildings, made of cement watered down with sand, collapsed."

More than 600 people are thought to have died in Boumerdes - well over half the official death toll.

"We've had terrorism, the Bab el Oued flooding (in November 2001 which killed 700 people), now this. All kinds of misfortune has struck Algeria," said one resident.

In the capital, many old buildings came down, especially in suburbs like el Oued and Belcourt.

Homes destroyed

"This building shook like a ship. I sheltered with my daughters in a door frame. That's why we're still alive," said Fatma Ferhani, 70.

"My apartment was completely destroyed, the armchair, the crockery, the television, everything was thrown to the ground, broken," Seghir, who lives on the 14th floor of one building, told AFP.

Her neighbour, Lounis, said they were on the balcony, looking at central Algiers "when I saw what looked like an enormous dust cloud".

The situation is not all that clear. We haven't made any contact with anyone alive Rescue worker

"I went dizzy as the building began to sway back and forth like a see-saw. All the furniture fell over, the chandelier flew out of the window."

Algerian television pictures have been showing piles of bodies.

A school was reported to have collapsed in Thenia, the nearest town to the quake's epicentre, where families are believed to be buried.

Rescue specialists are arriving from all over the world.

"The situation is not all that clear. We haven't made any contact with anyone alive. But neighbours have given us lots of information about people still inside," said Christen Stefan, a rescue leader on a Swiss and German team in Boumerdes.

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