Photo taken on January 16, 2010 shows a shelter of the earthquake refugees in Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti. [Xinhua]

The Haiti government plans a massive evacuation of citizens made homeless by Tuesday's earthquake, which registered 7.3 degrees on the Richter scale, the nation's interior minister, Antoine Bien-Aime said on Saturday.

"In many cases we are going to have to move the population and we plan to build temporary camps to host the homeless," Bien-Aime said.

He said that the International Organization for Migration (IOM)has already delivered a large number of tarpaulins for the homeless, but that the government had not yet begun to distribute them.

The nation's health minister, Alex Larsen, said the government had revised its estimate of the dead up to 70,000 in Port Au Prince. He said that the bodies were being buried in temporary mass graves.

(Xinhua News Agency January 17, 2010)