New Delhi: At least 11 people were killed, while more than 100 people were injured after a magnitude 6.6 earthquake jolted Pakistan and Afghanistan on Tuesday, the news agency Associated Press reported. The epicentre was in Afghanistan and the affected countries included Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, China, and Kyrgyzstan, reports said.
Strong tremors from the earthquake were also felt in Delhi-NCR and across much of northern India last night.
"An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.6 on the Richter Scale hit 133km SSE of Fayzabad, Afghanistan today at 10:17 pm IST," said National Centre for Seismology. The US Geological Survey said the centre of the magnitude 6.5 quake was 40km (25 miles) south-south-east of Jurm in Afghanistan’s mountainous Hindukush region, bordering Pakistan and Tajikistan.
Afghanistan’s disaster mitigation ministry told Reuters that at least two people were killed in Laghman province. In neighboring Pakistan, at least nine people died, including a 13-year-old girl who died when a wall collapsed at her home, and at least 100 others were injured.
Taimoor Khan, a spokesman for the provincial disaster management authority in the northwest, said at least 19 mudbrick homes collapsed in remote areas. “We are still collecting data about the damages,” he said, according to AP.
More than 100 people were brought to hospitals in the Swat valley region of Pakistan’s north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in a state of shock, Bilal Faizi, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s emergency services, told the Associated Press.
“These terrified people collapsed, and some of them collapsed because of the shock of the earthquake,” he said.
Faizi and other officials said nine people were killed when roofs collapsed in various parts of north-western Pakistan during the quake late on Tuesday.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shahbaz Sharif, said he asked disaster management officials to remain vigilant to handle any situation.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the main spokesman for the Taliban government in Afghanistan, tweeted that the ministry of public health had ordered all health centres to be on standby.
The region is prone to violent seismic upheavals. A magnitude 7.6 quake in 2005 killed thousands of people in Pakistan and Kashmir.
Last year in southeastern Afghanistan, a 6.1 magnitude quake struck a rugged, mountainous region, flattening stone and mud-brick homes. Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers put the total death toll from the quake at 1,150, with hundreds more injured, while the U.N. has offered a lower estimate of 770.