One dead, 30 injured in southern Pakistan earthquakes

KARACHI: At least one person was killed and 30 others were injured when a series of quakes hit southern Pakistan on Friday, officials said.

One of the quakes struck at the relatively shallow depth of 10 kilometres (six miles), 27 kilometres (16 miles) northeast of Nawabshah city in Sindh province, with a magnitude of 5.0, an official in the meteorological department told AFP.

He said the quake was felt in Nawabshah and several nearby small towns including Sakrand, Daur, Daulat Pur and Bandhi.

A local administration official, Irfan Kathio, told AFP: “The quake killed at least one person and injured 30 others including women and children.”

An emergency has been declared at the city’s hospitals and district offices, with schools and colleges closed down, he said. Around 100 houses in Nawabshah had been damaged.

“We received 30 injured in our hospital, of whom one 71-year-old man died of his injuries,” Mohammad Hashim, a senior doctor at Nawabshah’s civil hospital, told AFP.

He said the condition of five of the injured was critical. Taj Colony neighbourhood in Nawabshah was the worst affected, resident Ghulam Mustafa told AFP.

The roofs of many of the houses there had crumbled, he said, with electricity supply to the area disrupted.The quake was followed two aftershocks measuring 4.7 and 4.9 magnitude with epicentres in northeast and northwest of Nawabshah, the meteorology official said.

Pakistan was hit by a 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8, 2005, that killed more than 73,000 people and left about 3.5 million homeless, mainly in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.A 7.7-magnitude earthquake devastated several areas, including Awaran in southwestern Baluchistan province, in September. It killed at least 376 people and left 100,000 others homeless.