A strong earthquake hit Kyrgyzstan, killing at least 70 people, mainly in a remote village near the border with China, that rescuers were racing to reach, officials said yesterday.
The quake late on Sunday, which had a magnitude of 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), flattened the village of Nura in the isolated Alaisky district on the mountainous border.
“The current number of dead has reached 65 people,” the Kyrgyz Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said the quake had flattened 120 of the 428 houses in the village high in the mountains of southern Kyrgyzstan.
Emergency Situations Minister Kamchybek Tashiyev told journalists that more than 100 people “were injured to various degrees.”
The quake was felt as far away as the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, some 900km from Nura.
“The picture we saw was frightening. The village of Nura is fully destroyed, 100 percent. There are many injured. So far we have counted 60 dead. All of them are local residents,” Tashiyev said, before his ministry updated the toll.
Victims were being ferried by helicopter from Nura — a village of some 960 residents — to the main regional city of Osh, 220km away.
“The helicopter will make as many flights as needed to transport wounded people needing medical attention to the regional center,” Tashiyev said.
Rescue efforts were being hampered by the remoteness of the village and a lack of telephone links with it, while roads had become impassable in some places due to the quake, officials said.
“Efforts to assist the victims are being complicated by the distance of the villages ... from hospitals, by a lack of communications and by the destruction of the roads,” said health ministry official Dinara Sagynbayeva.
USGS said the epicenter of the earthquake was 60km east-southeast of Sary-Tash at a depth of 27.6km.
An aftershock of magnitude 5.1 hit the region just over two hours later, the USGS said.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offered his condolences in a telegram to his Kyrgyz counterpart Kurmanbek Bakiyev and ordered Russian rescuers to assist the relief effort.
Medvedev is due to visit Kyrgyzstan on Thursday for a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a grouping of former Soviet republics.
The meeting would go ahead on schedule despite the quake, Bakiyev’s office said.
Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous nation of five million people, is one of the poorest states of the former Soviet Union and lies in a seismically active region.
In February 2003, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in northwest China, with an epicenter close to Kyrgyzstan in the foothills of the Tianshan Mountains, claimed 268 lives and razed 20,000 houses.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS