BEICHUAN, China - China declared three days of national mourning for earthquake victims and suspended the Olympic torch relay as the search for survivors of the disaster grew bleak Sunday.

The State Council said the mourning period will start Monday and include three minutes of silence observed by citizens countrywide starting at 2:28 p.m. - exactly a week after the magnitude 7.9 quake struck - while air raid sirens and horns of vehicles, trains and ships wail in grief.

All national flags will fly at half-staff at home and at Chinese diplomatic missions abroad, and public recreational activities will be halted, said the council, China's cabinet.

Beijing Olympic organizers said in a statement that the torch relay would also be suspended for three days "to express our deep mourning to the victims of the earthquake."

The relay had continued last week after the quake on a more sombre note, with runners starting with a minute of silence and asking for donations along the route. Organizers have said the relay will be held in quake-hit Sichuan province next month.

The government said the confirmed death toll rose Sunday to 32,476. Another 220,109 people suffered injuries. Some 9,500 remained buried in Sichuan, the provincial government said.

Officials have said the final death toll is expected to surpass 50,000.

Rescuers amputated the legs of a woman to rescue her after six days trapped under a flattened power plant in Yingxiu town, the official Xinhua news agency reported. A man survived with head injuries after being pulled from a collapsed office building in Maoxian county to the northeast, and was expected to recover.

A "slightly bruised" man was also saved from a collapsed hospital after being trapped for 139 hours, the agency said.

In Beichuan town near the quake's epicentre, few hopeful relatives were seen as soldiers pulled bodies from the wreckage. Several dozen corpses in blue body bags lay in a street.

"It will soon be too late" to find trapped survivors, said Koji Fujiya, deputy leader of a Japanese rescue team that pulled 10 bodies from a flattened school Sunday. "We hope with our hard work we will find more people alive."

Wu Hai, a Chinese rescue team leader who came from neighbouring Yunnan province, said bodies in the town being found were in the middle stages of decomposition and "many of the limbs are broken off."

"There are definitely many more (bodies) here. Locals here said several thousands have been buried here," he said.

Experts say buried earthquake survivors can live a week or more, depending on factors including the temperature and whether they have water to drink.

A Malaysian rescue team in the town of Muyu, further north, sifted slowly and methodically through the wreckage. However, they were not tapping on the debris, as other crews had done earlier, in hopes that survivors would hear and respond. Instead, they used giant cutters to split steel girders.

Dozens of students were buried in new graves dotting a green hillside overlooking the rubble, the small mounds of dirt failing to block the pungent smell of decay.

Zhou Bencen, 36, said he raced to the town's middle school after the earthquake, where relatives who arrived earlier had dug out the body of his 13-year-old daughter, Zhou Xiao, crushed on the first floor.

Zhou cradled his wife in his arms, holding her hand and stroking her back while she sobbed hysterically. "Oh God, oh God, why is life so bitter?" Liao Jinju wailed, over and over. The couple's nine-year-old son survived.

The World Health Organization said conditions for homeless survivors were ripe for outbreaks of disease and called for quick action to supply clean water and proper hygiene facilities.

"Ensuring supply of food and safe drinking water and trying to restore good sanitation are critical because these are basic transmission routes for communicable diseases," said Hans Troedsson, WHO's representative to China.

Chinese health officials have not reported any disaster-related outbreaks so far.

Meanwhile, flood threats from rivers blocked by landslides from the quake appeared to have eased after three waterways near the epicentre overflowed with no problems, Xinhua said. County officials diverted the released water as a precaution.

The quake damaged some water projects, such as reservoirs and hydroelectric stations, but no reservoirs had burst, Liu Ning, engineer in chief with the Ministry of Water Resources, told Xinhua.

Also in the quake area, three giant pandas were missing from the world's most famous reserve for the endangered animals. Panda houses at the reserve were severely damaged and five staff members were killed, forestry spokesman Cao Qingyao told Xinhua.

The 60 other giant pandas at the Wolong Nature Reserve were safe, according to the agency.

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