"It's hard to have a fair assessment of the number of victims. How many construction, how many building were collapsed. Typically with the inhabitants inside, I believe we are well over 100,000," Bellerive said. "I hope that is not true, because I hope the people had the time to get out. Because we have so much people on the streets right now, we don't know exactly where they were living.
"But so many, so many buildings, so many neighbourhoods totally destroyed, and some neighbourhoods we don't even see people, so I don't know where those people are." He said he had tried to go from area to area late Tuesday to assess the damage in the capital Port-au-Prince, and especially the densely populated slums among the worst hit by the quake. "Last night I was trying to go to every place they told me there was a large number of people, victims," Bellerive told CNN.
"And I didn't see any houses. We don't see people leaving those places, so I come from the different places that I visit." A major earthquake rocked Haiti, killing possibly thousands of people as it toppled the presidential palace and hillside shanties alike and leaving the poor Caribbean nation appealing for international help.
A five-story UN building was also brought down on Tuesday by the 7.0 magnitude quake, the most powerful to hit Haiti in more than 200 years according to the US Geological Survey. Reuters television footage from the capital, Port-au-Prince, showed scenes of chaos on the streets with people sobbing and appearing dazed amid the rubble.
The quake's epicenter was only 10 miles (16 km) from Port-au-Prince, which has a population of about 1 million, and aftershocks as powerful as 5.9 rattled the city throughout the night and into Wednesday. Reports on casualties and damage were slow to get out of Haiti due to communication problems. As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is ill-equipped to respond to such a disaster, lacking heavy equipment to move debris and a sufficient force of emergency personnel.
"I am appealing to the world, especially the United States, to do what they did for us back in 2008 when four hurricanes hit Haiti," Raymond Alcide Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to Washington, said in a CNN interview. "At that time the US dispatched ... a hospital ship off the coast of Haiti. I hope that will be done again ... and help us in this dire situation that we find ourselves in. I'm asking the Haitians who are abroad to work together and bring all the effort in a concerted manner to help those back home."
Sara Fajardo, a spokeswoman for Catholic Relief Services, told the Los Angeles Times that its representative in Haiti said the death toll could be in the thousands. Brazil's army said at least four of its peacekeepers were killed and a large number of its troops were missing.