Powerful Quake Hits Middle East
The US Geological Survey said, a strong quake measured magnitude 7.3 hits a region which is 130 km from the southeast Sulaimaniyah city of Iraq, near Iran border.
Social network users in Jordan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia also said they felt the earthquake.
European-Mediterranean Geology survey Center released an image of the geographic range of this earthquake, which shows most Middle Eastern countries have felt its tremors.
According to Iranian news sources, More than 81 people have been killed in Iran and more than 1000 other have been injured.
Rescuers worked through the night to find people trapped in collapsed buildings after the earthquake.
“There are still people under the rubble. We hope the number of dead and injured won’t rise too much, but it will rise,” Mojtaba Nikkerdar said.
“The night has made it difficult for helicopters to fly to the affected areas and some roads are also cut off… we are worried about remote villages,” Iranian interior minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said in an interview on state television.
Nearly 100 of the victims were in the town of Sarpol-e Zahab, about 15km (10 miles) from the border. The main hospital of the town was severely damaged and struggling to treat hundreds of injured people, state television reported.
On the other hand, officials in Iraq reported that at least six people had died and 50 injured in the country.
According to the Guardian, the most extensive damage was in the town of Darbandikhan, 75km east of the city of Sulaimaniyah in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, where the mayor said four people had died.
The electricity was cut off in several Iranian and Iraqi cities, and fears of aftershocks sent thousands of people in both countries out onto the streets and parks in cold weather.
Meanwhile, CNN quoted from the USGS, the quake was centered 16 km west of Jaco, Costa Rica, at a depth of 10 km. It gave the quake a preliminary magnitude of 6.8, but later downgraded it.
The President of Costa Rica, Luis Guillermo Solís, tweeted that no tsunami warning had been issued.
The Fuerza Publica warned on Twitter that there were landslides on the road between Jaco to Tárcoles, further north.
