"These are definitely welcome comments," the UN's emergency coordinator in Pakistan Jan Vandemoortele told AFP, referring to Musharraf's announcement on Friday that he would delay plans to buy around 25 of the multi-million-dollar planes.

"It will certainly free up the money to take a larger part of the pie, because the work has to be done and if the international community will not come up with the resources, the ultimate resources will be domestic," he said.

Musharraf said during a tour of the devastated city of Muzaffarabad Friday that he was putting off the long-awaited deal to buy the US-built warplanes to focus on aid efforts.

"We are going to postpone that... we want to bring maximum relief and construction efforts," Musharraf told reporters.

The giant 7.6-magnitude earthquake four weeks ago killed 73,000 people and seriously injured about the same number. It also left about 3.3 million homeless and one million in urgent need of food supplies.

Islamabad estimates the cost of rebuilding devastated areas will be about five billion dollars -- a huge sum for a poverty-stricken country that already spends 17 percent of its national budget on defence.

Pakistan already has more than 30 multi-role F-16s made by US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. It hopes to buy another squadron of 25 of the planes, which are worth around 25 million dollars each.

Washington approved the sale of the F-16s to key "war on terror" ally Pakistan in March after blocking it for 15 years to protest the country's nuclear weapons programme.

Relations between the two countries warmed up again after Pakistan lined up with the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, abandoning its former allies, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

India was angered by the fighter deal, although the United States said it was prepared to sell New Delhi both F-16s and more sophisticated F-18 fighter-bombers if it wanted them.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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