Deadliest Earthquake Hits Napal, Claims At least 128

At least 128 people were killed and dozens injured in Nepal when a strong earthquake struck the western area of Jajarkot, officials said on Saturday, as houses in the area collapsed and buildings as far as New Delhi in neighboring India shook.

VerseNews gathered that the quake occurred at 11:47 p.m. (1802 GMT) on Friday with a magnitude of 6.4, Nepal’s National Seismological Centre said. The German Research Centre for Geosciences measured the quake at 5.7, downgrading it from 6.2, while the U.S. Geological Survey pegged it at 5.6.

The quake is the deadliest since 2015, when about 9,000 people were killed in two earthquakes in the Himalayan country. Whole towns, centuries-old temples, and other historic sites were reduced to rubble, with more than a million houses destroyed, at a cost to the economy of USD 6 billion.

Officials feared the death toll in Friday’s quake could rise as they had not been able to establish contact in the hilly area near the epicentre, some 500 km west of the capital Kathmandu, where tremors were also felt. The district has a population of 190,000, with villages scattered in remote hills.

“The number of injured could be in the hundreds, and the deaths could go up as well,” Jajarkot district official Harish Chandra Sharma told Reuters by phone.

Police spokesman Kuber Kadayat said 92 people were killed in Jajarkot and 36 in the neighboring Rukum West district, both in Karnali province. The epicenter was in the village of Ramidanda.

At least 85 people were injured in Rukum West and 55 in Jajarkot, an official in the prime minister’s office said, while Sharma said at least 50 people were in hospitals in Jajarkot alone.

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“Many houses have collapsed, many others have developed cracks. Thousands of residents spent the entire night in cold, open grounds because they were too scared to go into the cracked houses as aftershocks struck,” Sharma said.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal flew to the area early on Saturday with a 16-member army medical team to oversee search, rescue, and relief, his office said.