Rescuers were struggling to reach quake-stricken regions in Pakistan and Afghanistan on Tuesday as officials said the combined death toll from the previous day’s earthquake rose to 311.
According to Afghan and Pakistani officials, 237 people died in Pakistan and 74 in Afghanistan in the magnitude-7.5 quake, which was centered deep beneath the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan’s sparsely populated Badakhshan province that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China, AP reported.
Afghan authorities were scrambling to access the hardest-hit areas near the epicenter, located 73 kilometers south of Fayzabad, the capital of Badakhshan province.
In Pakistan, the Swat Valley and areas around the Dir, Malakand and Shangla towns in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were also hard-hit in the quake. The Pakistani town closest to the epicenter is Chitral while on the Afghan side it is the Jurm district of Badakhshan.
More than 2,000 people were injured in Monday’s temblor, which also damaged nearly 2,500 homes in Pakistan, officials said.
In Afghanistan, Ismail Kawusi, spokesman for the public health ministry said the numbers gathered so far from hospitals in various provinces recorded 457 injured.
Earlier, Wais Ahmad Barmak, the Afghan minister for disaster management, said 74 people were dead and 266 had been injured.
