When doctors and nurses from Singapore's Mercy Relief and SingHealth got to her, they found flies feeding on her open wounds, which had by then turned gangrenous. She was also badly dehydrated.

The medical team worked quickly to stabilise her condition and put her on a drip.

SCDF officers then carried her on a stretcher to the main road, ferried her to a helicopter evacuation pad in the city before having her flown to Islamabad for proper treatment.

The Singapore medical team was alerted to the woman's condition by Mr Sherijeel Tufail, 24, a master's student who had gone on his own from Karachi to help the quake victims.

He arrived at this remote village on Sunday and was helping some villagers clean their wounds when the injured woman's sister approached him for help.

When he saw the severity of the wounds of the injured old woman, he tried persuading the men in the village to help him carry her down to the main road.

They refused. The village head, Mr Shariff Jafar, 54, said the villagers did nothing to help their neighbour because they did not know if there was a hospital below.

'It is very steep, so it is dangerous for us to carry her down,' he said in Urdu.

Mr Sherijeel then dressed her wounds and sought help from the Mercy Relief team that was manning a nearby makeshift hospital in a refugee camp. They, in turn, asked the SCDF to help them rescue the woman.

On Monday morning, the Singapore team trekked 2km up the steep mountain, sometimes negotiating gradients of about 50 degrees, before reaching the village in about half an hour.

Two relief teams from Singapore are in Muzzafarabad, one of the worst-hit areas in last Saturday's quake in Pakistan, working in hospitals there.

The six-member Mercy Relief team comprises SingHealth doctors and nurses, while the SCDF and Singapore Red Cross Society team has 44 members.

The Pakistani authorities said yesterday that the number of people killed in the quake now exceeded 40,000.

On Saturday, the SCDF extricated the body of a Lebanese man from the debris of the collapsed five-star Neelum View Hotel.

The team found the body trapped from chest down by concrete rubble and a platform.

They used a hydraulic cutter and spreader to rip through about 10 metal bars to create space for Staff Sergeant Ngui Hook Siong to squeeze into the tiny crevice. He then used the spreader to further loosen the rubble and platform which was pinning the body down.

The whole operation took about an hour, and team leader Sheikh Wezal constantly updated the man's son. Lieutenant Sheikh, 30, said: 'We wanted to make sure we did not damage the body further so that we could hand the body back to his son as whole as possible.'

Another SCDF team is working at a base hospital near the helicopter landing pad and treating casualties who are being flown in from all over the city.

The team commander, Major Yap Kok Boon, said the team was pleased with what it had accomplished despite not being deployed in its 'core mission' of search and rescue.

'Every little bit of help counts towards helping the victims,' he said.