Fresh tremors hit Pak, no casualties

Fresh tremors jolted remote northern Pakistan on Sunday, one day after 20 people were killed in two earthquakes in the mountainous region. T...

Fresh tremors jolted remote northern Pakistan on Sunday, one day after 20 people were killed in two earthquakes in the mountainous region. There was no immediate word of new casualties or damage from the latest jolts, police and local officials said. ‘‘A few more jolts were felt today, but we don’t have any reports of casualties,’’ police officer Ghulam Sarwar said from the district of Battagram, 110 km north of Islamabad.

Three aftershocks registering 4.3 or below on the open-ended Richter scale were recorded by the meteorological department in the northwestern city of Peshawar, a department official said.

Pakistani Interior Ministry official Javed Iqbal Cheema said 20 people were killed and scores injured when two earthquakes registering 5.7 and 5.5 on the Richter scale convulsed the region on Saturday. Police said 13 people died in Battagram when falling rocks hit their minibus and it plunged into a ravine, while a boy was killed in the same area, when a wall fell on him. In the adjoining district of Mansehra, six people were killed and hundreds of houses were damaged.

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Cheema said doctors and police teams had been despatched to aid in rescue operations, but residents said poor road conditions and landslides in the extreme cold weather were hampering relief work.

The epicentre of the tremors was near the Kaghan valley, 200 km northeast of Peshawar. India’s Meteorological Department reported a tremor measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale in northern India on Saturday, but said it had no reports of damage or casualties.

-Reuters

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