A earthquake of magnitude 6.4 has hit Balochistan province in south-western Pakistan, with at least 100 people reported dead. It struck 70km (45 miles) north of Quetta at 0409 local time (2309GMT Tuesday) at a depth of 10km, the US Geological Survey said.A senior official in Balochistan said he expected the toll to rise. Many houses collapsed during the quake and some destroyed in landslides that followed it, officials said.
Reports say the provincial government of Balochistan has asked for help from the army and that the military has sent troops and helicopters to the area.
A senior army official Major General Salim Nawaz said the area where the earthquake had struck is thinly populated, and remains accessible for convoys carrying relief material.
A top civilian official in Balochistan province, Sohail-ur-Rehman, told a local news channel: "80 people are dead in this area where I am standing now."
Dilawar Khan, mayor of the town of Ziarat, said two areas in his district had been "badly hit".
The majority of the homes in the district are made of mud and are fragile, raising fears of a higher toll. "Hundreds of mud houses have collapsed. We are using whatever resources we have to help the people and have asked for help from the provincial government," he said. "There is a large number of injured people but we don't have an exact figure."
A television correspondent said he could see people retrieving bodies and that people in the villages were expressing anger that no local officials had arrived on the scene despite its relative proximity to the city.
Deaths have also been reported in Pishin district.
Local officials quoted by Reuters news agency said that 40 people had received treatment for minor injuries, mostly caused when mud walls collapsed or in the ensuing panic.
Mr Khan said that 14 people had been killed in one area of Ziarat, and 11 in another, with five deaths reported in Pishin.
"There were two tremors, the second one was serious and people rushed out of their houses," said Amjad Hussain, a resident of Quetta.
Quetta itself suffered almost complete destruction in an earthquake in 1935, with the death of about 30,000 people. More than 73,000 people were killed in the earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005 and almost an equal number were seriously injured.
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