Earthquake in Afghanistan kills at least 11, nine of them in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: At least nine people were killed and 44 injured in northwest Pakistan by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake that struck in neighbouring Afghanistan late on Tuesday, a Pakistani government official said.

At least two people were killed in Afghanistan, a disaster agency official there said.

The quake was felt over an area more than 1,000 km wide by some 285 million people in Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre said.

The epicentre was in the Hindu Kush mountains, in the sparsely populated northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan, 40 km (25 miles) southeast of Jurm village, at the considerable depth of 187 km (116 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said.

In Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, on the Afghan border, nine people were killed and 44 injured, senior provincial official Abdul Basit told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that at least 19 houses were damaged.

Shafiullah Rahimi, a spokesperson for Afghanistan's disaster mitigation ministry, said late on Tuesday that two people had been killed in the eastern province of Laghman.

Large parts of South Asia are seismically active because a tectonic plate known as the Indian plate is pushing north into the Eurasian plate.

A 6.1 magnitude earthquake in eastern Afghanistan killed more than 1,000 people last year.

In 2005, at least 73,000 people were killed by a 7.6 magnitude quake that struck northern Pakistan.