More than 500 people were injured, most of them seriously, during an earthquake measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale in northwestern Iran, local media reported. “The earthquake, which reached a depth of 10 kilometers in West Azerbaijan province, injured 528 people, of whom 135 were hospitalized,” regional governor Mohammad Sadegh Motamedian said on Iranian state television.
The earthquake and its aftermath “destroyed 50 houses and damaged another 500 in 12 villages in the province,” added Motamedian.
State television broadcast videos of the damage caused by the earthquake, which occurred around 3:30 a.m. local time (1:00 a.m. in Lisbon).
The country’s emergency service spokesman, Mojtaba Khaledi, told state television that electricity and water had been cut in villages “near the towns of Salmas and Khoy, close to the epicenter of the earthquake.”
Iran is located where several tectonic plates meet and experiences frequent seismic activity.
The deadliest earthquake in Iran was a magnitude 7.4 earthquake in 1990, which killed 40,000 people in the country’s north, injured 300,000 others and left half a million homeless.
In 2003, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in southeastern Iran devastated the ancient mud-brick city of Bam, killing at least 31,000 people.
Source: Observadora
