Helicopter rescues Taiwan miners as earthquake injuries cross 1,000

HUALIEN, Taiwan, April 4 (Reuters) - A helicopter plucked to safety on Thursday six people stranded in a mining area after Taiwan's worst earthquake in 25 years, while hundreds of aftershocks rocking the eastern region near its epicentre drove scores more to seek shelter outdoors.

The death toll from Wednesday's 7.2-magnitude quake rose to 10, with the tally of injured at 1,067, authorities said, while most of the roughly 50 hotel workers marooned on a highway as they headed to a resort in a national park were located.

But 660 people were still trapped, most of them in hotels in the park, after the road was cut off, the fire department said, as the discovery of a dead body on a hiking trail near the entrance to a gorge took the total deaths to ten.

A helicopter ferried to safety six miners trapped on a cliff in a dramatic rescue after the quake cut off the roads into Hualien's soaring mountains, in footage shown by the department.

The agriculture ministry urged people to keep away from the mountains because of the risk of falling rocks and the formation of "barrier lakes" as water pools behind unstable debris.

Thursday was the start of a long-weekend holiday for the tomb-sweeping festival, when families traditionally return home to attend to ancestral graves, though others will also visit tourist attractions.

People in largely rural and sparsely populated Hualien county were readying to go to work and school when the earthquake struck offshore on Wednesday.