The reports said the tremors were also felt in major Pakistani cities like Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Kohat and Malakand.
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“Rescue work is ongoing, and tents, blankets and sleeping mats are being provided”, Latif ur Rehman, a Pakistani disaster management official, told Reuters.
Twelve schoolgirls were killed in a stampede as they tried to get out of the shaking building in Afghanistan’s Takhar province.
The death toll could climb in coming days because communications were down in much of the rugged Hindu Kush mountain range where the quake was centered.
“Some 76 people including women and children were killed and 268 others were injured in the quake”, he said, warning that the toll was expected to rise.
Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, cut short his visit to the United Kingdom to fly home to deal with the emergency. This reportedly includes 12 Afghan girls who died in a stampede while attempting to flee from their school. In Pakistan, there has been at least 154 deaths, while 74 deaths have been recorded in Afghanistan’s northern provinces.
Pictures from Ghazni, south-west of Kabul, showed damage to buildings.
“At first it was as if someone was shaking us. Cell phone networks are down, we are using our wireless network to gather information”, said inspector general of police for the Kashmir region, Javid Gillani.
Rare images of a few collapsed structures and buildings have been broadcasted by Afghan broadcaster Tolo TV.
“It fell right before our eyes”.
“We have not seen an quake this powerful”. However, he said it was too early to say if any glaciers were destabilized by the quake.
Delhi’s metro ground to a halt during the tremor although the airport continued operating.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted he had ordered an urgent assessment of any damage.
Gul Mohammad Bidar, deputy governor of Badakhshan in Afghanistan, told AFP lines were down and it was hard to reach stricken communities.
Catherine Bhatti, from Durham in Great Britain, was visiting with relatives when the quake hit.
“It came out of the blue, everything began to move marginally afterward it became more powerful”.
Al Jazeera’s Nidhi Dutt, reporting from New Delhi, said many residents of the Indian capital had already moved back into their buildings.
“At the latitude of the quake, the India subcontinent moves northward and collides with Eurasia at a velocity of about 37 mm/yr”, USGS said.
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More than ten years ago, a 7.6 natural disaster struck near these areas and killed over 70,000 people.
