Buildings were damaged in 70 villages.
Tehran, Iran:
A 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck northwestern Iran overnight, killing at least three people and injuring more than 800 in the region near the border with Turkey, state officials and media said on Sunday.
Panicked residents fled their homes as buildings collapsed and cars were crushed by the debris, hundreds sought shelter from freezing conditions in evacuation centers as more than 20 aftershocks rattled the region.
The seismological center of Tehran University said the shallow quake hit the city of Khoy with a population of about 200,000 in West Azerbaijan province at 9:44 pm (1814 GMT) on Saturday.
“816 people were injured and three people died in the incident,” West Azerbaijan governor Mohammad Sadegh Motamedian was quoted as saying by news agency IRNA.
Images published by Iranian media showed people wrapped in blankets and huddled around a fire in the snow-covered area, as state TV aired footage of major damage to residential buildings, including half-destroyed homes.
The quake damaged buildings in 70 villages, the state news agency reported, as rescue workers cleared debris to evacuate people trapped in the area about 800 kilometers (500 miles) northwest of the capital Tehran.
The head of Iran’s Red Crescent Society, Pirhossein Koulivand, later announced that the search and rescue operation had ended, and that no survivors or bodies were found.
Iran’s Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi traveled to Khoy to inspect the situation, where he said water, electricity and gas connections had been affected, but were being restored, IRNA reported.
History of major earthquakes
Iran sits across the boundaries of several major tectonic plates and experiences frequent seismic activity.
On January 18, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck near Khoy, injuring hundreds of people.
In February 2020, a 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck the western Turkish village of Habash-e Ola and killed at least nine people.
Iran’s deadliest recorded earthquake was a 7.4-magnitude quake in 1990, which killed 40,000, injured 300,000 and left half a million homeless in the country’s north.
In 2003, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in southeastern Iran devastated the ancient mud-brick city of Bam and killed at least 31,000 people.
In November 2017, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck Iran’s western province of Kermanshah, killing 620 people.
And two earthquakes occurred near Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant in December 2019 and January 2020.
Iran’s Gulf Arab neighbors have raised concerns about the reliability of the country’s only nuclear power facility and the risk of radioactive leakage in the event of a major earthquake.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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