More than 800 people have been killed in an earthquake in a remote mountainous part of eastern Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesman said on Monday.
The magnitude-six earthquake struck just before midnight on Sunday and was followed by several aftershocks. The epicentre was about 27 kilometres northeast of the city of Jalalabad, capital of Nangarhar province, and just eight kilometres deep.
The fact that it happened at night, when people would have been asleep in their homes, means many would have been unable to escape, while the relatively shallow epicentre usually indicates greater levels of destruction.
A Taliban spokesman put the number of deaths at 812 in Kunar province alone, with nearly 3,000 more people injured, and indicated the overall toll was likely to be higher.
According to local media reports, several villages in the Nurgul district of Kunar were destroyed. The Taliban said rescue operations to free those trapped in the quake-hit areas are ongoing.
A Rukhshana reporter in Nangarhar said more tremors had shaken parts of eastern Afghanistan on Monday.
Afghanistan lies near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, and is prone to earthquakes. A magnitude 6.3 earthquake that struck the western province of Herat in October 2023 killed at least 4,000 people, BBC Farsi quoted the Taliban as saying, while the United Nations estimated the toll at around 1,500. The Herat earthquake was considered the deadliest natural disaster in Afghanistan in recent decades.
According to UNICEF, more than 90% of the victims of that earthquake were women and children.
In June 2022, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck parts of eastern Afghanistan, killing more than 1,000 people and injuring over 1,500 others.
