At least 280 people have been killed and more than 200 others injured after a powerful earthquake hit remote parts of southeastern Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan, the country’s disaster management authority says.
Most of the confirmed deaths were in the eastern Afghan province of Paktika, where 255 people had been killed, interior ministry official Salahuddin Ayubi said on Wednesday.
In Khost province, 25 people had been killed and 90 taken to hospital, he said.
“The death toll is likely to rise as some of the villages are in remote areas in the mountains and it will take some time to collect details,” he said.
The head of the Taliban administration’s natural disaster ministry, Mohammad Nassim Haqqani, earlier said that investigations were being conducted to determine if there were more casualties.
Photographs on Afghan media showed houses reduced to rubble.
Afghan journalist Ali M Latifi, reporting from Kabul, said people as far as the Afghan capital felt the aftershocks.
Authorities are reporting hundreds of houses have been destroyed in the region that has not seen a lot of development, Latifi said.
“Authorities have brought in helicopters and are calling for aid agencies to come in and rescue people from the rubble. But it’s a remote area and harder to reach,” he said.
There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties in Pakistan.
The magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck about 44km (27 miles) from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border, at a depth of 51km (31 miles), the United States Geological Survey said on Wednesday.
Strong jolts felt in Pakistan
Hedayatullah Paktin, journalist and political writer, said that most houses in the region are built traditionally with the use of soil, stone and other materials, adding that concrete houses are rare.
Unfortunately, the quake hits at a time Afghanistan is suffering from a big economic crisis, with little access to basic needs and medical facilities, Paktin told Al Jazeera from the Afghan capital.
Shaking was felt over a range of some 500km (310 miles) by about 119 million people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said in a tweet.
It was felt in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul as well as Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, according to witness accounts posted on the EMSC website and by users on Twitter.
“Strong and long jolts,” one witness posted on EMSC from Kabul. “It was strong,” another witness posted from Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department said the quake jolted parts of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, according to the Dawn news website, which added that there were no immediate news of deaths or damage.
The disaster comes as Afghanistan has been enduring a severe economic crisis since the Taliban took over in August, as US-led international forces withdrew after two decades of occupation.
In response to the Taliban takeover, many governments have imposed sanctions on Afghanistan’s banking sector and cut billions of dollars worth of development aid.
