(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-12-15 21:20

JAKARTA, Indonesia  -- A deep 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook eastern Indonesia on Saturday, sending panicked residents running out of their homes, the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency and witnesses said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries and no tsunami alert was issued, said Suharjono, an agency spokesman.

The tremor struck at a depth of about 100 kilometers (60 miles) in Maluku province, about 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) east of the capital, Jakarta.

The US Geological Survey put the quake at a magnitude 6.5.

"The TV, chairs, everything in my house fell down, I saw utility poles shaking," Gulman, a resident of Saumlaki town on the island of Tanimbar, told El-Shinta radio.

At least two other nearby quakes with magnitudes of 6.3 and 5.8 were felt several hundred kilometers (miles) away in East Timor, a witness said.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago with 17,500 islands, is prone to seismic upheavals because of its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

A giant quake off Indonesia's Sumatra island in 2005 spawned the Asian tsunami and killed more than 230,000 people in 11 countries, more than half of them in Indonesia.