Aftershocks Cause Slides, Kill 3 in Soviet Georgia

Two aftershocks from a severe earthquake set off landslides Friday that killed at least three people in the mountains of Soviet Georgia.

At least 114 people died in Monday’s quake and its aftermath, the official Tass news agency reported. The temblor also injured 300, left 70 missing and 67,000 homeless in the southern republic, it said.

An unconfirmed report by Soviet television news said the final toll may reach 300 dead and 1,000 injured.

Friday’s tremors struck in the same remote region as Monday’s quake, which had a magnitude of at least 7.0.

Soviet authorities could not provide measurements for Friday’s aftershocks. However, in the United States, the National Earthquake Information Center said they must have been aftershocks of less than magnitude 5 because they didn’t show up on its instruments in Golden, Colo.

Ground movement and landslides leveled the already damaged Caucasus Mountain villages of Chordi, Ire and Tsedisi, said Archil Kostava, the top administrative official in Kutaisi, the closest city to the quake zone.

Kostava said three people died in Chordi but that he had no details. He said most residents had been evacuated after Monday’s quake.

A Kutaisi police spokesman, Tamorasz Bluashvili, said the landslides, exacerbated by heavy rains, caused “huge devastation.”

The villages are about 75 miles northwest of Tbilisi. Tsedisi borders the South Ossetia region, where violence between ethnic Ossetians and Georgians has claimed more than 50 lives.

Bluashvili and Kostava reported that Ossetians took advantage of the chaos caused by the earthquakes to attack Tsedisi, an ethnic Georgian village, and stole cattle.

The updated death count came from Francois de la Roche, who heads a delegation from the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He said Monday’s quake destroyed about 95% of the buildings in the mountain towns of Sachkere, Oni and Ambrolauri.