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Strong quake hits Afghan province

An Indian Kashmiri vendor arranges oranges at his roadside stall in Srinagar yesterday. A strong tremor in Indian Kashmir jolted people from their beds and forced some survivors from October's devastating earthquake to run from their shelters screaming, police and witnesses said. The tremor was registered by the Pakistan Meteorological Department at 6.7 on the Richter scale. PHOTO: AFP

A strong earthquake early yesterday struck remote northeastern Afghanistan and shook neighboring Pakistan, the scene of a devastating quake two months ago.

Hours after the quake, officials were still trying to contact isolated communities to determine whether the temblor caused damage or injuries.

The US Geological Survey said the magnitude 6.7 quake was centered in the remote Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan. It struck shortly before 3am.

The quake -- centered about 95km southeast of Faizabad, capital of the sparsely populated Badakhshan province -- was felt more than 320km away in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Kabul, where the shaking lasted several seconds.

"It was a strong earthquake," said provincial police chief Shah Jahan Noori. He said there were unconfirmed reports of damaged homes in the Shahri Buzurg district to the northwest -- but no casualties -- and that authorities were still trying to contact other districts. There was no damage in Faizabad, he said.

A radio operator for the UN World Food Program in Faizabad, who goes by the single name of Shafiq, said he had been in contact with eight districts in the area, including Shahri Buzurg, and was told there was no damage.

Badakhshan governor Abdul Majid said the ground shook for two minutes in Faizabad. After daybreak, nearly six hours after the quake struck, he said he had no information about any damage in the mountainous region, where communication with remote districts is difficult.

The area lies about 320km from the center of the Oct. 8 quake that killed about 87,000 people in northwestern Pakistan and Indian Kashmir. Salim Akhtar, an official at the Peshawar earthquake center, said he did not consider it an aftershock of the October quake.

The temblor sent people scurrying outside in areas hit by the October quake, Pakistani television stations reported. The stations also reported landslides near the town of Bagh in Pakistani Kashmir, one of the areas worst hit by the October quake.

A magnitude 6 quake can cause severe damage. But Amir Shahzad, an official at Pakistan's Meteorological Department, said the quake might not have caused much damage because it occurred deep underground.

The US Geological Survey said its recorded depth was nearly 230km.

"We have not received reports of any damage or casualties, and we don't think there will be any either," Shahzad said, adding that authorities had not received any reports about damage from Chitral, the closest Pakistani area to the epicenter.

The area stretching across Pakistan into India and Afghanistan is a hotbed for seismic activity that erupts each time the plates of the Indian subcontinent slam into Asia.

A 6.9-magnitude earthquake centered in neighboring Takhar province killed up to 5,000 people in 1998, and a 5.8-magnitude quake in northeastern Afghanistan in 2002 killed up to 1,000 people. But other strong quakes in the thinly populated region have been far less deadly.

Reports of damage and casualties are usually slow to emerge following quakes affecting the isolated communities of flimsy mud houses that dot the inaccessible valleys of Badakhshan, an impoverished province that also borders Tajikistan and China.
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