Two people were killed in Afghanistan and another in Pakistan after the 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck earlier today. The epicenter of the earthquake was located in the Indo-Caucasus massif (Hindu Kush), near Afghanistan’s borders with Pakistan and Tajikistan, while it had a large focal depth (about 190 kilometers), according to the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center (EMSC) and the American Geological Survey (USGS).

A spokesman for the Afghan disaster management agency announced that two people had died in Laghman province, in the northeastern tip of the country. In neighboring Pakistan, a 13-year-old girl was killed when a wall collapsed at her home in Swat district (north), a police officer told Reuters.

Some communities in Badakhshan province, the epicenter of the earthquake, are inaccessible and residents do not have access to phone networks or the internet. In the provincial capital, Faizabad, 29-year-old Ashraf Nael said his house shook for about a minute. “Together with my brothers, we all ran outside… Our house is made of concrete, other brick buildings may have been badly damaged,” he said.

The tremor was felt as far away as India’s capital, New Delhi. In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir – where more than 80,000 people were killed by the deadly 2005 earthquake – residents fled their homes in panic, some crying and others chanting verses from the Koran, according to accounts reported by the agency. Reuters.

The earthquake was felt in a radius of about 1,000 kilometers, in eight countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan), according to the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center (EMSC).

On June 22, 2022, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck Afghanistan’s Paktika province, killing more than 1,000 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless. It was one of the deadliest earthquakes in recent decades in Afghanistan.