Money collected in the city's mosques will be used to build a new village to house 1,000 families living in earthquake-stricken Pakistan.

More than £130,000 donated by people in Preston since the disaster struck on October 8 will be used to build corrugated houses at the foot of Jabori Mountain, near Ballakot, which is one of the worst affected areas.

The new village will shelter families from the harsh winter and will make aid more readily available.

A meeting will be held later this week to discuss how the project will take place but it has yet to be decided whether Preston Muslims will travel to Pakistan or whether the plan could be coordinated through agencies already working in the country.

It is also hoped more money will be raised at a special night on November 19, at a venue yet to be confirmed, to create permanent brick structures for the families.

The pledge comes as Luckman Ismail, Altaf Bux, Mohammed Shareef Khan and Preston councillor, Younnus Khan, all members of Jamea Mosque, Clarendon Street, returned on Sunday from an eight-day tour of seven villages in the country where they delivered 4,500 tents and 10,000 blankets to help those in need. They saw first hand the destruction caused by the 7.6 magnitude earthquake during their tour of Abbotabad, Menshera, Ballakot, Jabori, Muzaffarabad, Ravlakot and Bagh.

Mr Ismail, 30, of Manchester Road, Avenham, did a five-hour trek to Jabori mountain village to speak to residents who were forced to walk for hours for water because natural springs were blocked following the earthquake.

He said: "The houses had fallen into the ground. Some people had pulled their relatives from the rubble and buried them. There were graves everywhere.

"One woman never stopped crying the entire time I was there because she had just buried her husband but had also given birth to a baby girl.

"I also met four little girls whose little sister had died during the earthquake. You just don't know what to say. Hopefully by creating this new village it will give them a new start and help them begin to put their lives back together."