Death toll climbs to 348 after Iraq earthquake
IRAN - A powerful magnitude-7.3 earthquake has rocked the northern border region between Iran and Iraq, killing more than 348 people in Iran and seven in Iraq and injuring thousands more. Iran’s state-run Irna News agency raised the death toll to 341 on Monday and said 5,953 people were injured after the quake that struck the country’s western provinces last weekend. Local officials said the tolls would rise as search and rescue teams reached remote areas. More than 70,000 people were in need of emergency shelter, the Iranian Red Crescent said. The hardest hit province was Kermanshah, where three days of mourning have been announced. More than 236 people died in the town of Sarpol-e Zahab, about 10 miles from the Iraq border. Farhad Tajari, the local MP, said 15 members of his family had been killed and that the town’s main hospital was severely damaged and struggling to treat hundreds of injured people. “Sarpol-e Zahab has only one hospital, which was demolished in this incident. All patients and hospital staff have been buried beneath the rubble, so it cannot offer any service,” he told local media. The quake killed at least seven people in Iraq and injured 535, all in the country’s northern, semiautonomous Kurdish region, the interior ministry said.
The magnitude-7.3 quake was centred 19 miles outside the eastern Iraqi city of Halabja, according to the most recent measurements from the US Geological Survey. It struck at a depth of 14.4 miles (23.2km), a shallow depth that can have broader damage. Magnitude-7 earthquakes on their own are capable of widespread, heavy damage. Rescuers worked through the night to find people trapped in collapsed buildings in towns affected by the quake, which was felt as far west as Israel and south to Baghdad. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered his condolences and urged government agencies to do all they could to help those affected. Iranian police, the elite Revolutionary Guards and its affiliated Basij militia forces were dispatched to affected areas overnight, state TV reported.
(Theguardian.com)