74 dead after Kyrgyz mountain village crushed in quake
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Rescuers are toiling in a remote mountain village close to Kyrgyzstan's border with China searching for survivors of a powerful earthquake that killed at least 74 people, 41 of them children.
Hours later, a powerful tremor also struck a sparsely populated area of China's Himalayan region of Tibet, killing at least 30 people, Chinese state media reported.
The Kyrgyz quake, which measured 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey and was felt hundreds of kilometres around, razed the village of Nura, located in the Tian Shan mountains at an altitude of 2,000 metres, said Kyrgyzstan's emergency situations minister, Kamchybek Tashiyev.
"The picture we saw was frightening. The village of Nura is fully destroyed, 100 per cent," Mr Tashiyev said.
"It all happened so suddenly, so horribly, the earth suddenly groaned and the house fell apart like cards, and what was worse - my six children were underneath the debris," Akim Zhoroev, one of the earthquake's survivors, recalled.
"Four of them I dug out with my own hands, and thank Allah they are alive, but my two youngest, the poor ones, they died instantly, when I got them out they were dead," he said, his voice breaking into uncontrollable sobs.
"I managed to get my child out when she was barely breathing, and my husband is in the hospital with many broken bones. Allah took pity on me and my daughter, we are alive, but where will we live now that winter's coming?" another survivor, Tynbu Isayeva, questioned as she cradled her baby.
Earlier, as helicopters airlifted out the injured, the head of Kyrgyzstan's Institute of Seismology, Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov said, "These were dilapidated houses, made of clay and straw, so they were totally destroyed."
An official in the press office of Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov confirmed to AFP that the death toll had risen to 74.
Deputy Health Minister Madamin Karatayev said the dead included 41 children.
More than 60 people needed treatment in hospital and 128 houses were ruined in the quake, which occurred overnight Sunday to Monday and produced several aftershocks.
The shockwaves were felt in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) away.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offered his condolences in a telegram to his Kyrgyz counterpart Kurmanbek Bakiyev and a Russian rescue plane was due to deliver tents and other aid to Kyrgyzstan on Tuesday.
Mr Medvedev was himself due in Kyrgyzstan on Thursday for a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a group of former Soviet republics.
Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous nation of 5 million people, is one of the poorest states of the former Soviet Union and lies in a seismically active region.
- AFP
