At least 35 people were killed and 80 injured in southwestern Pakistan on Tuesday when it was hit by tremors from a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in neighboring Iran, Pakistani officials said.
The epicenter was located in southeast Iran in an area of
mountains and desert, about 200 km (125 miles) southeast of Zahedan
and 250 km northwest of Turbat in Pakistan, the US Geological
Survey said, Reuters reported.
Three women and two children were killed when their mud house
collapsed in the district of Panjgur in the Pakistani province of
Baluchistan.
"The earthquake has killed at least five people in Panjgur,"
said Ali Imran, an official of the Provincial Control Room, a
government disaster-response unit in Quetta, the main city in the
region.
Earlier unconfirmed reports said up to 1,000 homes were destroyed
in the country because of the quake, tremors of which were felt as
far as New Delhi and Gulf states.
In the Baluchistan town of Mashkeel, several hundred houses
collapsed, according to Mohammed Ashraf, the head of a local health
center. Ashraf added that it was unclear whether there had been any
casualties, according to Reuters.
An Iranian crisis center official told the ISNA news agency there
had been no deaths reported in Iran so far.
Iran is situated sits on major geological fault lines and has
experienced a number of devastating earthquakes, including a 6.6
magnitude quake in 2003 that flattened the city of Bam, in Iran's
southeast, that left more than 25,000 people dead.