International media reports say powerful magnitude-7.3 earthquake has rocked the northern border region between Iran and Iraq, killing more than 400 people and injuring thousands more.
Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency has raised the death toll to 407 and said 6,700 people were injured after the quake that struck the country’s western provinces at 9.20pm local time on Sunday.
Local officials said the toll was likely to rise as search and rescue teams reached remote areas. More than 70,000 people were in need of emergency shelter, the Iranian Red Crescent said.
The hardest hit province was Kermanshah. More than 236 people died in the town of Sarpol-e Zahab, about 15 kilometers from the Iraq border. In Kermanshah’s Dalahu county, the local governor was quoted as saying that some villages had been completely destroyed.
The quake killed at least seven people in Iraq and injured 535, all in the country’s northern, semi-autonomous Kurdish region, according to The Guardian.
According to the most recent measurements from the US Geological Survey, the magnitude-7.3 quake was centered 30.6 kilometers outside the eastern Iraqi city of Halabja. It reportedly struck at a depth of 23.2 kilometers.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered his condolences and urged government agencies to do all they could to help those affected. Iranian police, the elite revolutionary guards and its affiliated Basij militia forces were dispatched to affected areas overnight, Iranian media outlets reported.
The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, has asked his government to focus on the aid supply.
Qasr-e-Shirin, another city in Kermanshah that serves as a gateway for the transfer of goods between Iran and Iraq, was also badly hit. At least 28 people are reported to have been killed there, Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) said.
Electricity was cut off in several Iranian and Iraqi cities, and fears of aftershocks sent thousands of people in both countries out on to the streets and parks in cold weather.
Iranian Tasnim News Agency reports the Iranian cabinet on Monday announced Tuesday as a public mourning day after the number of people killed in an earthquake that struck the country’s western province of Kermanshah has risen to 445.
