Kabul – A powerful earthquake of 6.1 magnitude hit Afghanistan with tremors felt in Pakistan and India. An Afghan emergency official says a powerful earthquake has killed at least 1000people and injured another 1500.

The toll is likely to rise as information trickled in from remote mountain villages.

Reaching rural areas even in the best circumstances remains difficult in Afghanistan, a landlocked nation with rutted mountain roadways that may now have sustained significant damage.

The quake struck about 44 km (27 miles) from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGC) said.

Most of the casualties so far were in the Gayan and Barmal districts in Paktika, a local doctor told the BBC. Local media site Etilaat-e Roz reported a whole village in Gayan had been destroyed.

Shaking was felt by about 119 million people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, the EMSC said on Twitter.

However, there have been no immediate reports of casualties, and the earthquake caused little damage in Pakistan, according to BBC Urdu.

"Strong and long jolts," a resident of the Afghan capital, Kabul, posted on the website of the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC).

An Afghan foreign ministry spokesman said they would welcome help from any international organisation.

Large parts of south Asia are seismically active because a tectonic plate known as the Indian plate is pushing north into the Eurasian plate.

Afghanistan is prone to quakes, as it's located in a tectonically active region, over a number of fault lines including the Chaman fault, the Hari Rud fault, the Central Badakhshan fault and the Darvaz fault.

The earthquake was at a depth of some 10km, according to seismologists, another factor that could lead to severe destruction.

In the past 10 years, more than 7,000 people have been killed in earthquakes in the country, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports. There are an average of 560 deaths a year from earthquakes.
-Reuters/BBC/Ap