At least 12 people have been killed and 204 injured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, official sources from both countries said Wednesday, a day after a magnitude 6.5 earthquake hit the Afghan Hindu Kush.
In Afghanistan, "health centers have reported 3 deaths and 44 injuries" due to the earthquake, the spokesman for the Ministry of Health of the interim Taliban government, Sharafat Zaman Amar, told the media.
According to the source, the three deaths in the provinces of Laghman (east) and Takhar (north) include a minor, while the injuries took place in various parts of the country.
The effects of the earthquake were also felt in Pakistan, where at least 9 people died in the northeastern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a spokesman for the provincial Disaster Management authority told Pakistani television Geo TV.
In total, the earthquake also left 160 injured throughout the country, according to information from the local channel.
The tremor was registered at 22:17 local time (16:47 GMT) yesterday, with an epicenter about 40 kilometers from the town of Jurm, in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, and close to the huge Hindu Kush mountain range, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
The Afghan Hindu Kush area is a center of great seismic activity and a common point of origin for telluric movements in the region.
At the end of last June, a similar earthquake of magnitude 5.9 in the eastern provinces of Paktika and Khost, bordering Pakistan, caused the death of more than a thousand people and injured some 1,500, in addition to the destruction of hundreds of houses.
The country also suffered one of the largest earthquake disasters in 1998 in the north of the country, when in February two earthquakes of magnitude 5.9 and 6 caused the death of some 4,000 people. A few months later, at the end of May, another earthquake of magnitude 7 shook the area again, causing some 5,000 deaths.
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