A strong tremor triggered panic on Tuesday among survivors of October’s earthquake disaster in South Asia, forcing people out of temporary shelters and into the freezing Himalayan winter.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or major damage after the 6,7-magnitude quake struck at 2.48am local time with an epicentre in the remote Hindu Kush mountains of north-eastern Afghanistan.
Witnesses said it felt like the strongest tremor since the 7,6-magnitude earthquake on October 8 that killed more than 73 000 people in Pakistan alone.
That quake also left about 3,5-million people homeless, mainly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and parts of the North West Frontier province.
In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, many survivors of the October 8 quake rushed from their tents and from houses still left standing by the original disaster.
“It was very strong. People came out of their tents and started screaming and reciting verses from the Qur’an,” resident Sarfraz Ahmad said.
“The people living in buildings spared by the big quake were the most terrified,” he added. “Now everyone is getting back into their shelters. They are reluctant, but they have no choice because the cold is unbearable.”
Panic-stricken residents were anxiously telephoning relatives and friends to check on their safety.
“Our men are surveying positions in remote villages, but there are no casualties so far,” said a police spokesperson in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir, where more than 1 300 people were killed in the October 8 disaster.
Haleema Akhter said seven members of her family had braved the freezing winter cold for 30 minutes after the temblor shook them from their beds.
“Thanks be to Allah that all my relatives are safe,” she said. “It was only after my two little children started shivering in cold that we decided to go back.”
Mosques in Indian-administered Kashmir were busier on Tuesday than usual, residents said.
“I went to the mosque to pray to Allah for forgiveness,” said Zulfikar Sheikh (43).
“We’ve definitely done some wrong! That’s why this is happening again and again,” he said, adding that the quake had widened the cracks in his house created by October 8’s massive earthquake.
The epicentre of Tuesday’s quake was in the Hindu Kush mountains, seismological official Nasir Mehmood from the Pakistan Meteorological Department said.
“The magnitude is 6,7, according to our final computation,” Mehmood said, revising upwards an earlier estimate of 6,6.
“It was a fierce-intensity earthquake about 375km north of Islamabad in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan.”
The United States Geological Survey also put the quake at 6,7 on the Richter scale and said it originated about 230km under the surface of Afghanistan’s north-eastern mountain chain.
France’s earth-sciences observatory registered the quake at magnitude 6,9.
Correspondents said the quake could also be felt in the Afghan city of Jalalabad and the capital, Kabul, as well as the Pakistani city of Peshawar near the Afghan border, but that it was too early to tell if there was any major damage.
The Hindu Kush is a sparsely populated area of small, remote villages that has been jolted by several quakes in the past years, being near the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates where seismic activity is high.
An earthquake measuring 6,1 in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush region in March 2002 killed about 1 000 people and destroyed several villages, according to the US Geological Survey. — AFP