Afghan quake kills 1,000; toll expected to rise

KABUL－A powerful earthquake struck a rural, mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border early on Wednesday, killing at least 1,000 people and injuring 1,500 others, authorities said.

Emergency officials warned the death toll will likely rise.

Afghan emergency official Sharafuddin Muslim provided the death toll at a news conference. Earlier, the director-general of state-run Bakhtar news agency, Abdul Wahid Rayan, wrote on social media that 90 houses had been destroyed in the province of Paktika and dozens of people were believed to be trapped under the rubble.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular news briefing on Wednesday that so far, there were no reports of casualties among Chinese citizens.

Wang said that China expressed its condolences over the deaths in the earthquake and extended its sympathy to the injured and the bereaved families, and that China is willing to provide humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan according to the country's requirements.

The temblor struck 44 kilometers from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border, the United States Geological Survey said.

"Strong and long jolts," a resident of the Afghan capital Kabul posted on the website of the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre.

The center put the magnitude of the quake at 5.9.

Photographs on Afghan media showed houses reduced to rubble and bodies covered in blankets on the ground.

In Kabul, Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund convened an emergency meeting at the presidential palace to coordinate the relief effort for victims in Paktika and Khost provinces.

Authorities had launched a rescue operation and helicopters were being used to reach the injured and bring in medical supplies and food.

Tremors were felt over 500 km away by about 119 million people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the center wrote on social media.

The disaster came as Afghanistan has been enduring a severe economic crisis since the Taliban took over in August 2021, after US-led Western forces withdrew following two decades of war. Many Western countries had imposed sanctions on Afghanistan's banking sector and cut billions of dollars worth of development aid following the Taliban takeover.

In 2015, an earthquake struck the remote Afghan northeast, killing several hundred people in Afghanistan and nearby northern Pakistan.

Mo Jingxi contributed to this story.

Agencies - Xinhua