Quake rocks Afghan border

The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude 6.7 quake was centered in the remote Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan. It struck shortly before 2:30 a.m.

The quake — centered about 60 miles southeast of Faizabad, capital of the sparsely populated Badakhshan province — was felt more than 200 miles away in Islamabad, Pakistan, and in Kabul, where the shaking lasted several seconds.

"It was a strong earthquake," said provincial police chief Shah Jahan Noori. He told The Associated Press there were unconfirmed reports of damaged homes -- but no casualties -- in the Shahri Buzurg district to the northwest.

After hours making contact with officials in far-flung mountain districts, Noori said he had no reports of casualties or severe damage.

A radio operator for the U.N. World Food Program in Faizabad, who goes by the single name of Shafiq, said he had been in contact with eight districts in the area, including Shahri Buzurg, and was told there was no damage.

Isolated communities of flimsy mud houses dot the inaccessible valleys of Badakhshan, an impoverished province that also borders Tajikistan and China.

Badakhshan governor Abdul Majid told The Associated Press the ground shook for two minutes in Faizabad.

The area lies about 200 miles from the center of the Oct. 8 quake that killed about 87,000 people in northern Pakistan and Indian Kashmir.

Salim Akhtar, an official at the Peshawar earthquake center, said he did not consider it an aftershock of the October quake.

In hard-hit Pakistani Kashmir, survivors of the October quake came out of their tents and homes and spent hours in the pre-dawn cold, said Dilawar Mir, an official at the Meteorological Department there. Pakistani television stations reported landslides near the town of Bagh.

Residents in Chitral, the Pakistani town closest to the epicenter of Tuesday's temblor, said they had seen no damage but had been scared out of their homes by a strong jolt. The quake also caused brief panic in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where hundreds rushed from their homes.

A magnitude 6 quake can cause severe damage. But Amir Shahzad, an official at Pakistan's Meteorological Department, said this one might not have caused much damage because it occurred deep underground. The U.S. Geological Survey said its recorded depth was nearly 140 miles.

"We have not received reports of any damage or casualties, and we don't think there will be any either," Shahzad said.

The area stretching across Pakistan into India and Afghanistan is a hotbed for seismic activity that erupts each time the plates of the Indian subcontinent slam into Asia.

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake in northern Afghanistan killed some 1,000 people in March 2002, and a magnitude 6.9 killed some 5,000 people in 1998.