At least 12 people have been killed and 204 injured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, official sources from both countries said this Wednesday, a day after a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck the Afghan Hindu Kush.
In Afghanistan, “Health centers have reported 3 deaths and 44 injuries” by the quake, the spokesman for the Ministry of Health of the interim government of the Taliban, 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 spokesperson for the provincial Disaster Management authority told Pakistani television GeoTV.
Total, the earthquake left 160 injured throughout the countryaccording to information from the local channel.
(Also: The shocking images left by the earthquake in Ecuador).
The tremor was registered on Tuesday night -local time- with an epicenter about 40 kilometers from the town of Jurm, in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, and close to the enormous Hindu Kush mountain range, in Afghanistan, according to the Geological Survey of United States (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-induced catastrophes 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.
EFE
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