Earthquake Kills 243 in China

A powerful earthquake struck China's remote western region of Xinjiang today, killing at least 243 people and collapsing more than 1,000 houses and school buildings, a disaster official and state media said.

The quake struck Bachu county on the western edge of Xinjiang, near China's mountainous border with Kyrgyzstan, at 10:03am (0203 GMT), the government said. The government recorded a magnitude of 6.8, while the US Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, put the magnitude at 6.3.

At least 158 people were killed, most of them in Bachu County in western Xinjiang, said Zhang Yong, director of disaster prevention for the Xinjiang Seismology Bureau.

Most of the dead in Bachu were in collapsed houses where the quake caught them eating breakfast, said an officer reached by telephone at the Bachu police station.

The area is about 1,750 miles west of Beijing. More than 1,000 houses and school buildings collapsed in one village in Bachu county, where the earthquake was centred, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The quake also shook neighbouring Jiashi county, but less damage was reported there, Mr Zhang said.

He said buildings in Bachu were older and flimsier than in Jiashi, where houses and shops had been rebuilt using more solid construction techniques after the area suffered a series of severe quakes in the late 1990s.

Earthquakes are common in Xinjiang, especially in its west, which covers the eastern foothills of the soaring Pamir and Tianshan mountains of central Asia. But they usually cause few injuries and little property damage because the area is so sparsely populated.

On January 5, a quake of magnitude 5.4 struck Jiashi county, but no deaths or injuries were reported. On December 25, a quake of magnitude 5.7 struck another part of western Xinjiang near the Afghan border. Some buildings were damaged but no injuries or deaths reported.