Relief work stepped up for Friday quake victims

Aid agencies on Monday stepped up emergency relief work for the latest victims of an earthquake in northern Afghanistan, which killed at least 50 people and injured another 150 on Friday.

Rebecca Richards, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told IRIN from the Afghan capital, Kabul, that most of those killed were children. The quake, measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale, hit several villages in Nahrin district of the northern Baghlan Province. Its epicentre was just 35 km from the surface.

"Dawabi and Khojakheder villages have completely flattened out," Richards explained. The two villages were previously damaged by the 25 March quake, which measured 6.1 on the Richter scale, killing about 1,000 people and making thousands more homeless.

According to OCHA, the most seriously affected locations were Dawabi and Khojakheder, where several hundred families had been provided with aid. Other areas affected by the quake included Borkeh, Jelgah valley, Shinderak, Koedhai, and Koh-I-Zolaaw - all in Nahrin district.

Cyril Dupre, an official of the French aid agency ACTED, told IRIN from Kabul that a total of 1,500 families needed help in the quake-hit areas.

"For the moment, urgent assistance has been completed for most of the affected people," Dupre said, including food, tents and blankets. "However, in the long run, we need to build shelters for the people, and ACTED plans to build between 5,000 to 10,000 such shelters in the future," he added.

Aid workers said massive relief work was undertaken from Saturday using helicopters, horseback and vehicles, and that while the area was rainy it was not particularly cold.

Friday's quake was felt in Kabul, as well as in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, and the western Pakistani border city of Peshawar. No casualties or destruction were reported in those cities.

Malik Salahuddin, a seismological official in Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province, told IRIN that aftershocks were still being recorded, suggesting the activity - unusual because of its shallowness - had not died out in the area, about 150 km north of Kabul.

"Usually the epicentre in that area is quite deep - more than 200 km deep - but this is shallow, just 35 km deep, and that is the reason for such massive localised destruction," Salahuddin explained.

He said 44 aftershocks were recorded by their office, the closest to Afghanistan, on Saturday alone. "Most of the aftershocks are about 4.3 on the Richter scale, but cannot be felt other than in the immediate area of the epicentre," he added.

Meanwhile, Reuters news agency reported on Monday that at least two more people had died on Sunday when another tremor jolted Nahrin District. Yet another tremor in the early hours of Monday morning shook wide areas of the country, but there were no immediate reports of deaths, the news agency added.

Friday's quake was the third to strike northern Afghanistan since last month. An earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale in the same area of the Hindu Kush mountains killed more than 100 people on 3 March. It was the strongest to hit the region since 1983.