Another strong earthquake yesterday morning shook western Afghanistan after deadly quakes on Saturday flattened whole villages in Herat Province, as officials yesterday significantly lowered the death toll from the weekend temblors to about 1,000.
The magnitude 6.3 earthquake yesterday was about 28km outside Herat, the provincial capital, and 10km deep, the US Geological Survey said.
It triggered a landslide that blocked the main Herat-Torghondi highway, Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture spokesman Abdul Wahid Rayan said.
Photo: Reuters
The aid group Doctors Without Borders said the Herat regional hospital received 117 injured from yesterday’s quake, adding that it was setting up four more medical tents at the facility.
“Our teams are assisting in triaging emergency cases and managing stabilized patients admitted in the medical tents,” it wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The epicenter of Saturday’s quake — also of the same magnitude 6.3 — was about 40km northwest of the provincial capital, and several aftershocks have been strong.
The Taliban government had originally said that more than 2,000 people had been killed in that earthquake, but Afghan Minister of Public Health Qalandar Ebad yesterday lowered the toll to about 1,000, attributing the confusion to the remoteness of the area and double reporting by agencies involved in the rescue effort.
“We have over 1,000 people martyred from the first incident,” Ebad told reporters in Kabul.
Yesterday’s quake also flattened all 700 homes in Chahak village, which was untouched by the tremors of previous days. Now there are mounds of soil where dwellings used to be, but no deaths have been reported so far in Chahak because people have taken shelter in tents this week, fearing for their lives as tremors continue to rock Herat.
Some residents said they had never seen an earthquake before and wondered when the shaking of the ground would stop.
Many said they have no peace of mind inside the tents for fears the “ground will open and swallow us at any moment.”
Besides rubble and funerals after Saturday’s devastation, there is little left of the villages in the region’s dusty hills. Survivors are struggling to come to terms with the loss of multiple family members and in many places, living residents are outnumbered by volunteers who had come to search the debris and dig mass graves.
In Naib Rafi, a village that previously had about 2,500 residents, people said that almost no one was still alive besides men who were working outside when the quake struck. Survivors worked all day with excavators to dig long trenches for mass burials.
On a barren field in the district of Zinda Jan, a bulldozer removed mounds of earth to clear space for a long row of graves.
“It is very difficult to find a family member from a destroyed house and a few minutes to later bury him or her in a nearby grave, again under the ground,” said Mir Agha, who is from Herat and had joined hundreds of volunteers to help the locals.
Additional reporting by AFP
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
RSS