About 2,000 people were killed after the magnitude 6.3 earthquake that struck Herat province in western Afghanistan on Saturday, the Taliban government said in a new report on Sunday.
About six villages were destroyed and hundreds of civilians were buried under the rubble, Information Ministry spokesman Abdul Wahid Rayan said, calling for urgent help.
An earlier report, also released this Sunday, reported “more than 1,000” fatalities.
“Unfortunately, the number of deaths is very high,” Taliban government spokesman Bilal Karimi told Agence France-Presse.
Afghanistan recorded at least seven earthquakes on Saturday. The first, the one with the largest magnitude (6.3 on the Richter scale) took place at 12:11 local time (four hours more than in Portugal), at a depth of 14 kilometers and 33 kilometers from the city of Zindah Jan, located in the province of Herat.
Four consecutive replicates of 5.5 followed; 4.7; 6.3; and 5.9 respectively within an hour.
The fourth earthquake, also with a temperature of 6.3 degrees, was recorded at a depth of about 10 kilometers and about 29 kilometers from Zindah Jan.
Later, the North American Seismological Survey detected two other earthquakes almost an hour later, also in Herat province (4.8 and 4.9 degrees respectively).
The Asian country is highly vulnerable to natural disasters because it is located in the Hindu Kush Mountains, an area of high seismic activity and the usual starting point for telluric movements in the region.
Source: DN
