A South African business has donated five million rands (US$675,000) to Haitian earthquake victims.

On Friday the Cape Town-based company presented a check to Imtiaz Sooliman from the South African humanitarian aid organization Gift of the Givers, which sent two search and rescue missions to the stricken Caribbean country.

"Our only hope is that these funds find their way to the most vulnerable members of the community and somehow help them in their quest to rebuild their shattered lives," Nazeem Ebrahim, Oasis Group Holdings marketing director told the media in Cape Town.

A quake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale hit Haiti on January 12, killing an estimated 200,000 people.

The South African Press Association (SAPA) reported on Friday that the same company had provided assistance in the past following disasters such as the southeast Asian tsunami in 2004 and the Mozambique floods in 2002.

Sooliman said the check was biggest single donation the 18-year- old organization had received, he said. It would be spent on medical supplies and equipment such as an X-ray machines.

Gift of the Givers had a medical team of 53 people in Haiti.

Sooliman told SAPA: "What you see and what you hear does not adequately describe the horror of what is on the other side. Pictures do not capture the stench of decaying corpses, they do not capture the total scale of devastation."

The South African teams who had been there had found it very difficult, he said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 30, 2010)