PESHAWAR/KABUL, March 22 (Portal) – At least 13 people were killed and more than 90 injured in Pakistan and Afghanistan after a 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck late Tuesday, government officials said.
At least nine people have been killed and 44 injured in north-western Pakistan, a Pakistani government official said, and hospitals in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were placed under a state of emergency overnight.
At least four people were killed and 50 injured in Afghanistan, a health ministry official said.
Homes and buildings in both countries were also damaged, authorities said.
About 285 million people in Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan felt the quake over a width of more than 1,000 kilometers, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Center said.
The epicenter was in the Hindu Kush mountains in the sparsely populated northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan, 40 km southeast of the village of Jurm, at a considerable depth of 187 km, the US Geological Survey said.
In Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, senior provincial official Abdul Basit said at least 19 homes were damaged in addition to those killed and injured.
Shafiullah Rahimi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s Emergencies Ministry, said late Tuesday that two people had been killed in eastern Laghman province.
Large parts of South Asia are seismically active because a tectonic plate known as the Indian Plate is pushing north into the Eurasian Plate.
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake in eastern Afghanistan killed more than 1,000 people last year.
In 2005, at least 73,000 people were killed by a magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck northern Pakistan.
Reporting by Jibran Ahmad in Peshawar, Mohammad Yunus Yawar and Charlotte Greenfield in Kabul; Writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by Jacqueline Wong
Our standards: The Thomson Portal Trust Principles.