BISHKEK, Oct 6: Rescuers toiled on Monday in a remote mountain village close to Kyrgyzstan’s border with China searching for survivors of a powerful earthquake that killed at least 74 people, 41 of them children.

Hours later, a powerful tremor also struck a sparsely populated area of China’s Himalayan region of Tibet, killing at least 30 people, Chinese state media reported.

The Kyrgyz quake, which measured 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey and was felt hundreds of kilometres around, razed the village of Nura, located in the Tian Shan mountains at an altitude of 2,000 metres (6,500 feet), said Kyrgyzstan’s emergency situations minister, Kamchybek Tashiyev.

The picture we saw was frightening. The village of Nura is fully destroyed, 100 per cent, Tashiyev said.

The devastation in the village, from where rescuers were ferrying out the injured by helicopter, was graphically described by the head of Kyrgyzstan’s Institute of Seismology, Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov.

These were dilapidated houses, made of clay and straw, so they were totally destroyed, he said.

An official in the press office of Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov confirmed the latest rise in the toll.

The number of victims has reached 74, the official told AFP.

Deputy Health Minister Madamin Karatayev said the dead included 41 children.

More than 60 people needed treatment in hospital and 128 houses were ruined in the quake, which occurred overnight Sunday to Monday and produced several aftershocks.

Shockwaves were felt in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, about 400km away, while other tremors were felt both in Tibet and in northwest China.

Kyrgyz emergency officials said earlier more than 100 people had been injured in and around Nura, a village of some 960 residents close to the point where the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and China intersect.

Victims were air-lifted to the main regional city of Osh, 220 kilometres from the quake scene.

The helicopter will make as many flights as needed to transport wounded people needing medical attention to the regional centre, said the emergencies minister Tashiyev.—AFP