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BEIJING - AT LEAST 30 people were killed in the strong earthquake that struck China's Himalayan region of Tibet on Monday, state media reported, citing local government sources.
The earthquakes hit China's remote western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang on Monday but both appear to have struck sparsely populated, mountainous areas and caused only limited damage.
The more powerful quake shook Tibet in the late afternoon, from an epicentre around 80 km west of the regional capital Lhasa. It was a magnitude 6.6 tremor, the US Geological Survey said on its website.
Residents in the city said they had felt the quake, but there was no visible damage. Closer to the epicentre, in the county of Qushui, buildings trembled and windows rattled but a hospital official said there were no reports of any injuries.
'It lasted for around one minute and there was an aftershock about fifteen minutes later,' said Mr Zhang Dong, who works in the office of the director of Qushui County Hospital.
'The building is still fine but windows trembled loudly. Nobody is hurt around us so far.'
It came the day after a quake in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan killed 70 and flattened a village, and the same day as another strong quake in Afghanistan.
China is also still smarting from the memory of the massive Sichuan earthquake, which killed at least 80,000 and devastated whole towns on May 12.
Tibet's seismological department sent a team to the area and local officials planned a briefing in the evening, but there was no damage reported at cultural sites like the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama's traditional seat, the official Xinhua agency said.
Just after midnight local time a magnitude 5.7 quake hit an area near China's western border with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, about 20 minutes after the Kyrgyzstan tremor.
Four homes collapsed and more than 200 were damaged, but nobody was hurt, Xinhua reported. -- REUTERS
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