Kabul: A powerful earthquake that struck eastern Afghanistan killed more than 1,400 and injured 3,000 others, the Taliban government said on Tuesday, making it one of the deadliest to hit the country in decades.
The casualty count has mounted steadily since the 6.0-magnitude earthquake hit late on Sunday night, devastating remote areas in mountainous provinces near the border with Pakistan. Chief Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that 1,411 people were killed and 3,124 people were injured in the hard-hit province of Kunar alone. Another dozen people were killed and hundreds injured in neighbouring Nangarhar province.
The earthquake could impact "hundreds of thousands", said United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan Indrika Ratwatte. Rescuers were still desperately searching for survivors in the rubble of homes flattened in Kunar.
Emergency "operations continued throughout the night", the head of the Kunar Provincial Disaster Management Authority, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said. He said there were "still injured people left in the distant villages" in need of evacuation to hospitals. The toll may rise as some of the hardest-hit villages remain inaccessible due to blocked roads, the UN migration agency said.
The earthquake epicentre was about 27 km from Jalalabad, according to the US Geological Survey, which said it struck just eight km below the Earth's surface. Such relatively shallow quakes can cause more damage, especially since the majority of Afghans live in low-rise, mud-brick homes vulnerable to collapse.
After decades of conflict, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, facing a protracted humanitarian crisis and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbours Pakistan and Iran in recent years.
