Quake Kills at Least 109 in Pakistan

Pakistan was rocked early Friday by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 that knocked down huts while the inhabitants were asleep and killed at least 109 people.

The quake, centered hundreds of miles away in neighboring Afghanistan, shook for a minute at about 4 a.m., collapsing the fragile huts in clouds of dust. Officials said at least 350 people were injured.

Pakistani rescue officials reported a steadily increasing death toll throughout the day as reports from remote parts of this impoverished country of about 100 million trickled in. In Lahore in eastern Pakistan, doctors said at least 10 people suffered heart attacks after the quake.

In neighboring Afghanistan, at least four people were killed by the quake, which also jolted parts of India and Soviet Central Asia, the official Kabul Radio reported.

The official Soviet news agency Tass reported that the quake was strongly felt in the central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan but reported no casualties. It said the quake triggered landslides and destroyed communications, power lines, roads and several residences in Tadjikistan.

Most of the damage in Pakistan was confined to the lawless tribal area only miles from the Afghan border, where a brutal civil war has raged for the last 12 years.

Pakistan’s state-run television reported that more than 100 homes were destroyed in the northwest Pakistan frontier region about 400 miles from the quake’s epicenter.

The quake rattled windows in the capital of Islamabad for about a minute and sent frightened residents fleeing into the streets, officials said.

Among the worst affected were Afghan refugees living in squalid camps throughout the frontier region. More than 3 million Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan after 1979 when the Soviet Union intervened militarily in their homeland. They are scattered throughout the northwest in tent villages and dried-mud homes.

“We rushed emergency assistance to the remote areas around Chitral,” about 200 miles from Islamabad, a government official in the area said on condition that he not be identified. “People were praying and running outside of their homes.”