Strong earthquake strikes Afghanistan and Pakistan

KABUL: A strong 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit the border area between northeast Afghanistan and Pakistan on Friday, shaking buildings in both countries, officials said.

The quake struck at 12:21 am (1951 GMT Thursday) at a depth of 196 kilometres (122 miles) in the Hindu Kush area, the US Geological Survey said.

It said the epicentre was 77 kilometres south-southeast of Feyzabad in Afghanistan, near the Tajikistan border, and 115 kilometres northwest of Chitral in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

‘It was a severe earthquake. People woke up and came out of their houses, fortunately there was no damage,’ Chitral resident Momin Khan told AFP.

‘It was a major earthquake. The intensity was 6.3 on the Richter scale and the epicentre was in the Hindu Kush mountains,’ said Riaz Khan, a senior official at Pakistan's meteorological department.

‘It was felt in most parts of Pakistan, including Kashmir, and also in Afghanistan,’ he told AFP.

‘So far we have no reports of human losses but there may be some slight damage in the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ he added.

The tremors woke Pakistanis up in the middle of the night in some areas where panicked residents ran out of their homes, witnesses said.

‘There are reports of five people slightly injured in Dir and Swat owing to cracks in walls,’ said Javed Khan, an official in the main police control room for Pakistan's NWFP.

‘But as a whole, there are no major losses or damage,’ he added.

Northern Afghanistan and Pakistan are frequently hit by earthquakes, especially around the Hindu Kush range near the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake in northwest Pakistan and Kashmir in October 2005 killed 74,000 people and displaced 3.5 million.