Three days after the 7.6-magnitude quake struck Kashmir on October 8, Islamabad appealed for high-resolution satellite pictures to help relief efforts, the journal said in an article on its website nature.com.

Such pictures can be of vital help in planning logistics, such as identifying which roads are open, which settlements are isolated and whether aftershocks could trigger landslides or breach dams.

Last Friday, an organisation called Charter on Space and Major Disasters put a series of high-resolution pictures of the quake zone on its website, but pulled them off again just hours later, the article said.

The charter was set up by a consortium of space agencies in 2000 to supply satellite images and data to communities in need of relief following a disaster.

Nature, quoting a senior official at the charter who requested anonymity, said the pictures had been removed at Pakistan's request.

"It feared the images could compromise security in the Kashmir region -- an area that has long been disputed territory between India and Pakistan," the article said.

"The UN and other aid agencies need Pakistan's cooperation on the ground, and had no choice but to comply," it said.

Photos of the quake zone have now disappeared from websites such as the UN's ReliefWeb and satellite imaging site UNOSAT and Reuters' AlertNet, while other sites, such as the European Union's disaster site, have made the pictures password-protected, according to the journal.

The main relief organisations can still access the pictures on a "need-to-know" basis, but the pulling of the images is a blow to local aid groups and to professionals worldwide who can make vital contributions by using the Internet, it said.

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