At least 71 people were killed on Tuesday and scores injured in a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that rocked Indonesia's Sumatra island, officials said. "There are 71 people dead and 47 people badly injured," Suryadi, a rescue co-ordinator on Sumatra, told AFP.
Hospitals in affected areas were already working at full capacity and were unable to treat more people, Suryadi said. Another official said hundreds of people were injured. "The number of people injured has become 257," Rosmini Savitri, a local government official in the disaster zone, told AFP by phone.
The quake hit at 10:49am, the US Geological Survey said, about 50 kilometres northeast of the West Sumatra capital Padang. Tanah Datar and Solok were among the worst hit areas.
The quake was followed by an aftershock almost as strong. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's spokesman had earlier told reporters at least 70 were killed and scores injured. The president intended to visit the site of the disaster on Wednesday, a news report quoted the spokesman as saying.
Many people were trapped in collapsed buildings and there was no official information about the situation at the quake's epicentre because phone lines were down, Utjin Sudiana, West Sumatra's police chief, told AFP. "The epicentre is in Batusangkar but communication is disconnected from there so we don't know what the damage is," he said.
Solok mayor Samsurahim said there was widespread damage. "Several houses have collapsed. There are hundreds of victims," he told ElShinta radio, adding that a school had burnt to the ground after the quake.
A spokesman for the UN children's agency Unicef in Geneva said that at least 82 people were believed dead, but that figure could not immediately be confirmed. Indonesia, an archipelago of some 17,000 islands, sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where continental plates meet-and where earthquakes are a regular and often deadly occurrence.
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