Peshawar/Kabul (Reportase One) – At least 13 people have been killed and more than 90 injured in Pakistan and Afghanistan after an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 hit the country late Tuesday (21/3), according to local authorities.
A Pakistani official said nine people were killed and 44 injured in northwestern Pakistan.
Hospitals in the northern part of the country’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province have been placed on emergency alert overnight.
Meanwhile, a health official in Afghanistan said four people were killed and 50 injured in the quake.
Pakistani and Afghan authorities also stated that houses and buildings were damaged by the quake.
The earthquake was felt by about 285 million people spread over an area of ​​more than 1,000 kilometers across Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, according to a statement by the European-Mediterranean Seismological Center.
The earthquake was felt as far as India’s capital, New Delhi.
Later, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) stated that the epicenter of the earthquake was located in the Hindu Kush mountains, about 40 kilometers from the village of Jurm, in the sparsely populated Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan, and a depth of about 187 kilometers.
Abdul Basit, a senior official in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said that apart from the fatalities and injuries, 19 houses were reported damaged.
Meanwhile, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s disaster mitigation authority Shafiullah Rahimi stated late on Tuesday that two people were reported dead in Laghman Province in the east of the country.
Most of South Asia is an active seismic area due to the movement of the Indian plate to the north so that it collides with the Eurasian plate.
One of the impacts of this collision is the formation of the Himalayas.
Last year, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan which killed more than 1,000 people. In 2005, around 73,000 people died in a magnitude 7.6 earthquake that hit northern Pakistan.
Source: Reuters
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Also read: Bahrain provides assistance to victims of the Afghanistan earthquake
Translator: Nabil Ihsan
Editor: M Razi Rahman
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