TEHRAN, Aug 11: Two strong quakes in quick succession struck towns and destroyed villages in northwest Iran, killing at least 180 people and injuring more than 1,300 on Saturday, officials said.

The scale of the disaster was still emerging, with the casualty toll creeping up as the hours ticked by. Thousands fled their homes and remained outdoors as at least 20 aftershocks hit the area.

The disaster zone was located about 90km from the borders with Armenia and Azerbaijan, and 190km from the border with Turkey.

Officials had to use radios because of disrupted telephone communications in the region and dispatched helicopters to remote villages. The head of the regional natural disasters centre, Khalil Saie, said: “We are asking people to not panic. Help is arriving and rescuers are already at the scene.”

The US Geological Survey, which monitors seismic activity worldwide, said the quakes were of at 6.4 and 6.3 magnitude.

According to the local Red Crescent director, cited by the official news agency IRNA, 210 people were rescued from the quake rubble and taken to hospital.

An emergency services official said 66 rescue teams were at work, using 40 devices and seven dog squads to detect buried survivors. He said 185 ambulances had been sent to the area.

The injured were taken to hospitals in Tabriz and Ardebil, the two biggest nearby cities, both of which escaped relatively unscathed by the temblors.

The towns of Ahar and Varzaqan, 60km from Tabriz, were the hardest hit, being closest to the epicentres of the two quakes.

Heris, another town close by, was also badly shaken. Scores of villages were decimated.

“Sixty villages have been 60 to 80 per cent destroyed and four villages were 100 per cent destroyed,” Mr Saei said.

There were “30 deaths in Ahar, 40 in Varzaqan and 10 deaths in Heris,” he said. Another seven people died as they were being transferred to hospital.

Municipal officials in Ahar and Varzaqan were giving higher counts, suggesting the overall toll could rise further.

Photographs posted by Iranian news websites showed about a dozen bodies lying on the floor in the corner of a white-tiled morgue in Ahar, and medical staff, surrounded by anxious residents, working on the injured in the open air as dusk fell.

“I was just on the phone talking to my mother when she said ‘there’s just been an earthquake’, then the line was cut,” one woman from Tabriz, who lives outside Iran, wrote on Facebook after telephoning her mother in the city.

“God, what has happened? After that I couldn’t get through. God has also given me a slap, and it was very hard.”

Tabriz is a major city and trading hub far from Iran’s oil producing areas and known nuclear facilities. Homes and businesses in Iranian villages, however, are often made of concrete blocks or mud brick that can crumble and collapse in a strong quake.

Fars news agency quoted lawmaker Abbas Falahi as saying he believed rescue workers had not yet been able to reach between 10 and 20 villages.

A local provincial official urged people in the region to stay outdoors during the night for fear of aftershocks, according to IRNA. Falahi said people in the region were in need of bread, tents and drinking water.

The Turkish Red Crescent said it was sending a truck full of emergency supplies to the border, an official said.

Allahverdi Dehqani, a lawmaker in Varzaqan, confirmed that “most of the villages around Varzaqan have been damaged”.

Residents in the region were terrified as their homes shook around them when the quakes hit, and they fled into the streets for safety, according to reports.

Rescue operations continued till late into the night.

Tehran University’s Seismological Centre said the first earthquake hit at 4.53pm (1223 GMT) with an epicentre just 60km from Tabriz, close to Ahar, and at a depth of 10km. The second -- actually a big aftershock -- rumbled through just 11 minutes later from nearly the same spot. A series of 20 smaller aftershocks rating 4.7 or less rapidly followed.

Iran sits astride several major fault lines and is prone to frequent earthquakes, some of which have been devastating.

The deadliest was a 6.6-magnitude quake which struck the southern city of Bam in December 2003, killing 31,000 people -- about a quarter of the population -- and destroying the city’s ancient mud-built citadel.—Agencies