KARACHI, July 16: Three tremors shook southern localities of the city when a moderate earthquake hit Balochistan on Saturday morning. “Two minor quakes jolted the city at around 4:48am and 10:47am. The first measured 1.6 on the Richter scale and the other 3.6. Their intensity was too low to enable us to determine their exact location,” the director-general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department, Dr Qamaruzzam Chaudhry, told Dawn.

The tremors had also been felt in some phases of Defence and in localities around I.I. Chundrigar Road, he added.

He said the moderate earthquake, which measured 5.5 on the Richter scale, pummelled the region around Loralai in Balochistan at 7.17am. He said the epicentre of the earthquake was around 700km south-west of Peshawar, adding that it was also felt in Karachi.

Dr Chaudhry said there were no indications that the earthquakes had been caused by an explosion in the Arabian Sea.

Sources in the Met Office said the earthquake monitoring device in Karachi was too old to be accurate, but those in Quetta and Peshawar were modern.

The PMD director-general made it clear that earthquakes could not be predicted in any case. “But the government has started to put in place a Rs193 million seismic activity monitoring project which would be headquartered in Karachi and also serve as an early tsunami warning system,” he said.