Massive earthquake hits Afghanistan, deaths reported across South Asia

In one of the worst incidents in Afghanistan, 12 girls were killed in a stampede while trying to escape from their school in the northern city of Taloqan.

“They fell under the feet of other students,” said Abdul Razaq Zinda, the provincial head of the Afghan National Disaster Management Agency, who reported heavy damage in Takhar.

Power was cut across much of Kabul, where tremors were felt for about 45 seconds. Houses shook, walls cracked, and cars rolled in the street. Afghanistan's Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah called an emergency meeting of the disaster management authority to assess the damage, his senior adviser Omar Samad tweeted.

Hikmat Fasi, a resident of Parwan province in northern Afghanistan, said the quake caused a lot of damage in the area. “We are safe, but I saw a lot of buildings collapse,” Fasi said. “It caused severe damage to our area. We are just praying.”

Strong tremors were felt in New Delhi and Islamabad, residents told Al Jazeera. In the Pakistani capital, walls swayed, and people poured out of office buildings in a panic.

International aid agencies working in the northern areas of Afghanistan reported that cellphone coverage in the affected areas remained down in the hour after the initial quake.

In Islamabad, buildings shook, and people poured into the streets in a panic, with many reciting verses from the Quran.

“I was praying when the massive earthquake rattled my home. I came out in a panic,” said Munir Anwar, a resident of Liaquat Pur in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province.

Shaukat Iqbal, a resident of the Charsadda district in Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province said it felt as if the earthquake “kept getting worse with time.”

India’s northernmost region of Kashmir experienced intense and prolonged tremors that caused panic in areas that suffered severe flooding last year. Power supplies and most cellphone networks were knocked out, and there was damage to roads and buildings.

No casualties were reported in Indian Kashmir, however. The earthquake struck almost exactly six months after Nepal suffered its worst recorded earthquake, on April 25. Including the toll from a major aftershock in May, 9,000 people lost their lives, and 900,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in that disaster.

The mountainous region in which Monday's quake struck is seismically active, with earthquakes the result of the Indian subcontinent driving into and under the Eurasian landmass. Sudden tectonic shifts can cause enormous and destructive releases of energy.

A 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck northern Pakistan on Oct. 8, 2005, killing about 75,000 people. 

Al Jazeera and wire services