BISHKEK: A powerful earthquake struck the mountains of Central Asia, killing at least 74 people while 30 people were killed in another strong earthquake that struck China’s Himalayan region of Tibet on Monday.

A 6.6-magnitude quake near the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan hit the remote village of Nura hard, bringing down dozens of buildings and injuring more than 100 people in addition to the confirmed deaths, Emergency Situations Minister Kamchybek Tashiyev said.

“What we’ve seen is terrible, the village of Nura is completely destroyed 100 per cent,” Tashiyev said. “There are many injured and we’ve counted 60 dead so far, all of them local residents,” he said.

A few hours later, Health Ministry spokeswoman Yelena Bayalinova said that the death toll was 72. Tashiyev said a helicopter was ferrying the most seriously injured to hospitals in the nearest sizable city, the southern regional centre of Osh, more than 100 kilometers away, and would return to collect more of the injured.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry to help Kyrgyzstan respond to the quake. The late Sunday quake’s magnitude was 6.6 and the epicenter was in Kyrgyzstan, the US Geological Survey said. It said a 5.1 magnitude quake followed a few hours later on Monday. The Kyrgyz Emergency Situations Ministry said the epicenter was in Tajikistan.

Meanwhile, thirty people were killed in another earthquake in Tibet, state media reported, citing local government sources. The earthquake struck at 4:30 pm in a sparsely populated area about 84 kilometres west of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, the US Geological Survey said.

US seismologists initially put the magnitude of the quake at 6.6, but later revised that down to 6.3. Xinhua, quoting local government officials, said many houses in Damxung County — home to about 42,000 people — near the quake’s epicentre had collapsed, and that “more people were still buried in debris”.

Soldiers and medical teams were dispatched to the area, where roads and communications had been cut off, the report said. More deaths were reported in a neighbouring county, Xinhua said, adding that, an exact figure was not available.

The agency quoted Zhu Quan, director of the Tibetan seismological department, as saying that authorities were still trying to determine the exact number of casualties. The quake was felt strongly in Lhasa, Xinhua said, citing local sources.