Scores killed as quake hits Pakistan

More than 100 people have been killed in an earthquake in south-western Pakistan today.

Minister for revenue and rehabilitation Zamaruk Khan said the government was preparing to provide food, shelter and medical care to survivors.

The quake struck two hours before dawn in the impoverished province of Baluchistan, an impoverished area bordering Afghanistan.

The US Geological Survey reported that the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.4 and was a shallow 10 miles below the surface.

The death toll was expected to rise as reports arrived from remote areas of the province.

“It will be much more,” Sohail ur Rahman, a top civilian official in one of the affected districts, told Dawn News TV station.

He said 500 houses had been destroyed.

The army said it was rushing medical teams on helicopters to villages in the quake zone.

The quake was centred about 400 miles south west of the capital Islamabad.

The worst-hit area appeared to be Ziarat, where hundreds of mostly mud and timber houses had been destroyed in five villages, mayor Dilawar Kakar said.

Some houses had been buried in a landslide triggered by the quake, he said.

A reporter for AP Television News saw dozens of bodies and injured in a hospital in Kawas in Ziarat district.

A doctor there, Mohammed Irfan, said the hospital was unable to cope with the injured it was receiving.

Pakistan is prone to violent seismic upheavals.

In October 2005, a magnitude-7.6 quake devastated Kashmir and northern Pakistan, killing about 80,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Baluchistan is home to a long-running separatist movement, but is not considered a major battleground in the fight against Taliban militants that plague other border regions.