KABUL: Hundreds were feared dead and injured in an earthquake of magnitude 6 that struck Afghanistan’s rugged northeastern province of Kunar, authorities said on Monday (Sep 1), as rescuers combed the rubble of homes in a hunt for survivors.
Early reports showed 30 dead in a single village, the health ministry said, but added that accurate casualty figures had yet to be gathered in an area of scattered hamlets with a long history of earthquakes and flooding.
The epicentre of the quake, which struck at a relatively shallow depth of 8km, was located 27km east-northeast of the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, according to the US Geological Survey.
The quake struck at 11.47pm local time, USGS said.
“The number of casualties and injuries is high, but since the area is difficult to access, our teams are still on site,” health ministry spokesperson Sharafat Zaman said in a statement.
Hundreds of injured were taken to hospital, said Najibullah Hanif, the provincial information head, with figures likely to rise as reports arrived from remote areas with few roads.
Rescuers were working in several districts of the mountainous province where the midnight quake hit at a depth of 10km, to level homes of mud and stone on the border with Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, officials said.
The quake shook buildings from Kabul to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, around 370km away for several seconds, AFP journalists said.
Afghanistan is prone to deadly earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.
A series of earthquakes in its west killed more than 1,000 people last year, underscoring the vulnerability of one of the world’s poorest countries to natural disasters.
