Tuesday, December 13 2005 18:14 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Jalalabad (Afghanistan): Four people were hurt, one of them badly, when an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale struck mountainous north-eastern Afghanistan early today (Dec 13, 2005), health officials said.

The massive tremor, which hit in the early hours of the morning, also destroyed a house in the eastern city of Jalalabad, a doctor in the city's hospital told sources.

"So far we've received four wounded people, three of them slightly and only one woman was badly injured," Doctor Ayoob Shinwari said.

The woman broke several bones when the ceiling of her home collapsed onto her, he said. The other three broke bones and hurt their heads when they fled their houses as the quake struck.

The epicentre was in Afghanistan's Badakshan province in the Hindu Kush Mountains, a sparsely populated area of small, remote villages that has been jolted by several quakes in the past years. Officials in Badakshan could not be reached for information about the effect of the quake although reports cited officials saying there had been no serious damage.

A government official in Kabul said earlier that preliminary reports indicated that no one had been hurt in any of Afghanistan's provinces.

"Preliminary reports taken from all the provinces were that there were no casualties. But we are asking them to check again," Afghanistan's interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai told sources.