Pakistanis are pictured outside after evacuating nearby buildings following tremors in Karachi yesterday.

AFP/Islamabad


At least 34 people were killed and hundreds of houses destroyed in southwestern Pakistan yesterday when the region was struck by tremors from an earthquake that was centred in neighbouring Iran, Pakistani officials said.
Mohamed Ashraf, the head of a local health centre in Mashkeel, said several hundred houses in the town had collapsed.
Three women and two children were also killed when their mud house collapsed in the Baluchistan district of Panjgur.
“The earthquake has killed at least five people in Panjgur,” said Ali Imran, an official at the Provincial Control Room, a government disaster-response unit in Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan.
In the towns of Mand and Turbat in western Baluchistan, residents reported feeling strong tremors that left cracks in the walls of houses, but there were no initial reports of deaths or injuries.
PTV said the houses were damaged in Mashkail in Washuk district.
There were cracks in government buildings in the area and PTV said President Asif Ali Zardari had expressed grief over the losses in Iran and Pakistan.
Local hospital official Ashraf Baloch told AFP by telephone from Mashkail earlier that five people were dead, mostly as a result of homes caving in.
Iran’s Seismological Centre said that the 7.5-magnitude quake struck at 3:14pm in the country’s southeast, close to the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan. The website of the US Geological Survey put the magnitude of the quake at 7.8.
Mehdi Zare, an official at the Seismological Centre, told state television that the earthquake was unprecedented in 56 years.
In December 2003, a 6.6-magnitude quake killed 31,000 people in Iran’s southern city of Bam and destroyed its ancient, mud-built citadel.
Yesterday’s earthquake was felt across large parts of Pakistan including Islamabad, where buildings shook, and the largest city Karachi where tremors prompted many to flee buildings in terror.
There were no reports of significant damage to infrastructure.
Pakistan’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, one of Pakistan’s biggest charities but on a UN terror blacklist as an alleged front for terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, announced on Twitter that its teams were already in place.
“Rescue and Aid Teams have reached Kharan and Panjgour while relief efforts are underway now in these districts,” it wrote on its official account.
Hafiz Mohamed Saeed, the head of JuD and the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, also tweeted in English: “Our thought, prayers go out to the victims of earthquake in Iran affected areas in Pakistan. Our Rescue & aid Teams have reached at site.”
Pakistani meteorologist Mohamed Riaz told AFP that the epicentre of the earthquake was in southern Iran at a magnitude of 7.9 and a depth of 155km.
Pakistan was hit by a 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8, 2005, that killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5mn homeless, mainly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and parts of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.