At least 13 people were killed and over 90 wounded in Pakistan and Afghanistan after a 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck late Tuesday, according to government officials.
A Pakistani government official said at least nine people were killed and 44 injured in northwest Pakistan, and hospitals in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were put into a state of emergency overnight.
An official at the Afghan Ministry of Health reported that at least four people were killed and 50 wounded in Afghanistan.
Authorities said homes and buildings in both countries were also damaged.
The Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center mentioned that the quake was felt by about 285 million people over an area of more than 1,000 km in Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan.
The US Geological Survey highlighted that the epicenter of the quake was in the Hindu Kush mountains in the sparsely populated Badakhshan province in northeastern Afghanistan, 40 km southeast of the village of Gorm, at a depth of 187 km.
In Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Abdul Basit, a senior provincial official, said in addition to the dead and injured, at least 19 houses were damaged.
Shafiullah Rahimi, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Disaster Mitigation, said late Tuesday that two people were killed in the eastern province of Laghman.
Large parts of southern Asia are seismically active because the tectonic plate known as the Indian plate is pushing north into the Eurasian plate.
A 6.1-magnitude earthquake in eastern Afghanistan killed more than 1,000 people last year.
In 2005, at least 73,000 people died in a 7.6-magnitude earthquake that struck northern Pakistan.
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