'I've never experienced a quake like this'

Peshawar/Kabul - Strongest Afghan quake since 1949 sends powerful tremors across South Asia

Afghanistan's strongest earthquake in more than six decades shook buildings across South Asia, prompting officials from Kabul to Islamabad to New Delhi to send out rescue teams to search for survivors. Early reports said more than 200 people died.
Pakistani state television announced that at least 139 people were killed and nearly 600 others wounded across the country, while Afghan officials said 63 people were killed and more than 200 wounded.
The US Geological Survey said the epicentre of the 7.5-magnitude earthquake was in the Hindu Kush mountains, in the sparsely populated province of Badakhshan, which borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. It said the epicentre was 213km deep and 73 kilometres south of the provincial capital, Fayzabad.
Read: Rescuers race to reach quake zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan as toll nears 300
In Afghanistan, the dead including 12 schoolgirls, seven people in the eastern province of Nangarhar, two in Nuristan province in the northeast and three in eastern Kunar province, officials said.
In Pakistan, Zahid Rafiq, an official with the meteorological department, said the quake was felt across the country. In the capital, Islamabad, buildings shook and panicked people poured into the streets, many reciting verses from the Holy Quran.
"I was praying when the massive earthquake rattled my home. I came out in a panic," said Munir Anwar, a resident of Liaquat Pur in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province.
Pakistan's army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, ordered troops to the quake-affected areas, the military said in a statement.
"We were very scared ... We saw people leaving buildings, and we were remembering our God," Pakistani journalist Zubair Khan said by telephone from the Swat Valley northwest of the capital, Islamabad.

Particularly hard-hit in Pakistan was the northern province of Chitral, where 11 people were killed, police official Shah Jehan said, adding that the death toll was likely to rise because so many areas were cut off from communications.
Journalist Gul Hammad Farooqi, 47, said his house had collapsed.
"I was thrown from one side of the road to the other by the strength of the earthquake. I've never experienced anything like it," Farooqi said.
"There is a great deal of destruction here, and my house has collapsed, but thankfully my children and I escaped."
Further south, the city of Peshawar had one death but at least 150 injured people were being treated at the city's main hospital, the provincial health chief said.
Read: Expats make frantic calls after deadly earthquake
"The strongest earthquake in recent years has caused heavy damages and casualties in the nation," Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan's chief executive officer, told the country in a televised address. He said that 12 children died in a stampede as they tried to run out of a school building during the earthquake.
The quake was also felt in the Indian capital New Delhi, though no damage was immediately reported.Office buildings swayed and workers who had just returned from lunch ran out of buildings and gathered in the street or in parking lots. In Srinagar, the main city in the India-administered Kashmir, the tremors lasted at least 40 seconds, with buildings swaying and electrical wires swinging wildly, residents said.
"First I thought somebody had banged the door. But within seconds, the earth began shaking below my feet, and that's when I ran out of the building," government official Naseer Ahmed said.

People ran outside, shouting, crying and chanting religious hymns in an effort to keep calm. "I thought it was the end of the world," shopkeeper Iqbal Bhat said.
Srinagar Police Inspector General Syed Javaid Mujtaba Gilani said that "some bridges and buildings have been damaged", including a cracked highway overpass.
Two elderly women died from heart attacks suffered during the earthquake, including a 65-year-old woman in the northern Kashmiri town of Baramulla and an 80-year-old in the southern town of Bijbehara, officials said.
Omar Abdullah, the former chief minister of India-administered Kashmir state, wrote on Twitter that electricity was cut off in the main city of Srinagar. Office workers in New Delhi evacuated buildings. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani convened an emergency meeting to assess the damage. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for an urgent assessment of the earthquake.
The South Asia region has a history of catastrophic earthquakes because the tectonic plate that carries the Indian subcontinent is pushing northward into the main Asian plate.  The 7.5 earthquake is the biggest to hit Afghanistan since 1949, according to USGS data.
"This was by far the most severe earthquake I've felt in my lifetime," Abdullah Ahmadzai, the Asia Foundation's Afghanistan representative, said by phone from Kabul.
"The region near the epicentre is not a highly populated district, but the structures there are very basic and vulnerable to these sorts of natural disasters.
There is a lot of concern about mass destruction there."

Major earthquakes in the last 30 years

April 25, 2015: A 7.8 magnitude quake in Nepal kills almost 8,900 people and destroys about half a million homes. A massive aftershock killed dozens more.
August 11, 2012: Twin earthquakes with a magnitude 6.3 and 6.4 leave 306 dead and more than 3,000 injured near the Iranian city of Tabriz.
March 11, 2011: Nearly 18,900 are killed when a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.0 quake hits Japan, triggering a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi atomic plant.
October 23, 2011: An earthquake of 7.2 magnitude rocks eastern Turkey, leaving more than 600 dead and at least 4,150 injured.
January 12, 2010: Magnitude 7.0 quake hits Haiti, leaving between 250,000 and 300,000 dead.
April 14, 2010: A 6.9-magnitude quake hits Yushu county in northwest China's Qinghai province leaving 3,000 people dead and missing.
May 12, 2008: A quake measuring 8.0 hits China's southwest province of Sichuan, leaving more than 87,000 people dead or missing.
May 27, 2006: A powerful quake in Indonesia's Yogyakarta region kills 6,000 and leaves 1.5 million homeless.
October 8, 2005: An earthquake of 7.6 kills over 75,000, majority of them in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province and the Pakistani-administered Kashmir state.
March 28, 2005: An earthquake on Indonesia's Nias island off Sumatra leaves 900 dead.
December 26, 2004: An undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra island triggers a tsunami which kills 220,000 in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.
December 26, 2003: An undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra island triggers a tsunami which kills 220,000 in countries around the Indian Ocean, including 168,000 in Indonesia.
January 26, 2001: A massive 7.7 earthquake hits the western Indian state of Gujarat, killing 25,000 people and injuring 166,000.
September 30, 1993: A 6.3-magnitude quake hits the western Indian state of Maharashtra, killing 7,601.
October 20, 1991: A quake measuring 6.6 hits the Himalayan foothills of Uttar Pradesh state in India, killing 768.
August 20, 1988: A magnitude 6.8 quake hits eastern Nepal, killing 721 people in Nepal and at least 277 in the neighbouring Indian state of Bihar. - AFP

A Pakistani boy stands on the rubble of houses in Kohat

A rescue worker carries an injured child at a hospital in Jalalabad, Afghanistan

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