PESHAWAR: Scores of students were injured in a school in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Battagram district as a 4.5 magnitude earthquake jolted parts of the province on Monday.
No loss of life or property was reported after the quake rocked various KP districts, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PMDA) said.
However, at least 57 students were injured when panic ensued in classrooms on the third floor of a school in Battagram. The students were shifted to a local hospital.
Three of these students are in a critical condition, the deputy commissioner’s office said.
In October last year a 7.5-magnitude quake ripped across Pakistan and Afghanistan, killing almost 400 people and flattening buildings in rugged terrain that impeded relief efforts.
Pakistan is located in the Indus-Tsangpo Suture Zone, which is roughly 200 km north of the Himalaya Front and is defined by an exposed ophiolite chain along its southern margin.
This region has the highest rates of seismicity and largest earthquakes in the Himalaya region, caused mainly by movement on thrust faults.
Along the western margin of the Tibetan Plateau, in the vicinity of south-eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, the South Asian plate translates obliquely relative to the Eurasia plate, resulting in a complex fold-and-thrust belt known as the Sulaiman Range.
Faulting in this region includes strike-slip, reverse-slip and oblique-slip motion and often results in shallow, destructive earthquakes.
The PMD recorded about 851 seismic disturbances in 2015.
