Powerful Quake Hits Northern Afghanistan, Shaking The Region

The quake was felt in most of the northern parts of Pakistan including such major cities as Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Sargoda and Kohat, officials said.

Afghanistan’s CEO Abdullah Abdullah said reports of damage and injuries were coming in from the nation’s northeast.

At least 1,000 more were injured and hundreds of homes destroyed as the quake shook a swathe of the subcontinent, sending thousands of frightened people rushing into the streets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

At least two people were also killed in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province and in Pakistan controlled Kashmir. It said the epicenter was 213 kilometers (130 miles) deep and 73 kilometers (45 miles) south of the provincial capital, Fayzabad. In Pakistan, TV footage shows cracked buildings, houses with missing roofs, cars crashed by trees, and injured people crowding into hospitals.

The epitcentre is close to the site of an October 2005 quake which had a 7.6 magnitude quake and killed more than 75,000 people, displacing a few 3.5 million more, although that quake was much shallower. He said more than 100 people were wounded in the area.

A 7.7 magnitude quake struck southern Asia on Monday afternoon, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

“The students rushed to escape the school building in Taluqan city (capital of Takhar), triggering a stampede”, Takhar education department chief Enayat Naweed told AFP.

In Afghanistan, worldwide aid agencies working in northern areas reported that cell phone coverage in the affected areas remained down in the hours after the initial quake.

Afghanistan’s Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah called an emergency meeting of the disaster management authority to assess the damage, his senior adviser Omar Samad tweeted.

“I was praying when the massive natural disaster rattled my home”.

Journalist Gul Hammad Farooqi, 47, said his house had collapsed.

The 7.7-magnitude natural disaster, with an epicenter in a remote part of northern Afghanistan, was felt in cities across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Casualties and damage are unclear at this stage.

CNN teams in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan all felt strong tremors. In Islamabad, walls swayed and people poured out of office buildings in a panic, reciting verses from the Quran, the AP said.

Geophysicist Amy Vaughan of the USGS tells NPR’s Newscast desk that the region is “very seismically active”, noting that this is where the Eurasian and Indian plates converge.