KABUL, February 6: A powerful earthquake jolted Afghanistan's remote northeast this week, killing as many as 4,000 people, an Afghan official said today in the first casualty reports to emerge.The quake hit the city of Rustaq, 280 km north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, destroying 15,000 homes, said Sher Mohammed, a spokesman for the military alliance that controls the area.Tremors of varying intensity rocked the mountainous area for hours afterwards, he said, speaking to the Associated Press by satellite telephone.The US Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, put the magnitude of wednesday's quake at 6.1.Mohammed said landslides at the quake's epicenter caused much of the destruction.``The hills collapsed into each other, making a huge crater in the earth,'' he said.News of the devastation in the isolated northern province of Tahkar, which borders Tajikistan, reached Kabul only Friday, and details remained difficult to confirm.Ousted Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who leadsthe anti-Taliban alliance that controls part of northern Afghanistan, including Tahkar, has appealed for urgent help from the United Nations and the Red Cross, Mohammed said. ``President Rabbani also called for a one-day mourning period and asked people across the Afghan nation to pray,'' Mohammed said.UN and Red Cross officials in neighboring Pakistan said they were trying to arrane relief teams to travel to the area, but could not confirm the casualty figures.Taliban officials in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, said they were unaware of the quake. The Taliban, which controls the remaining 85 percent of Afghanistan, is locked in battles with the northern opposition alliance on at least three different fronts north of Kabul and in western Afghanistan.Compounding the destruction, Mohammed said, Taliban jets dropped cluster bombs on Tahkar's provincial capital of Taloqan today, injuring 12 people. The provincial capital is 40 km south of Rustaq.
