TEHRAN Another earthquake struck northeast Iran yesterday as rescuers battled snow clogged mountain roads to reach victims of two tremors the day before which killed more than 70 people and left thousands homeless.
The new quake measured 5.7 on the Richter scale and hit Bojnurd, said the seismological centre in Mashhad, 160 miles away.
About 3,000 families lost their homes in two earthquakes measuring 6.1 and 5.4 which rocked northeast Iran on Tuesday, leaving 72 people dead and 360 injured, according to the latest toll.
The deputy governor of Khorasan province, Mr Mohsen Akbarzadeh, said the homes were destroyed in the Bojnurd region. About 72 villages in northern Khorasan, close to the central Asian state of Turkmenistan, were either flattened or severely damaged, local officials said.
President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has ordered a special team to the stricken region to assess the damage and speed up relief operations, Tehran Radio said.
It was the deadliest earthquake to hit Iran since 1991 when a tremor measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale left 40,000 dead and about half a million homeless.
The Turkmeni Foreign Ministry said yesterday that an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale hit Turkmenistan late on Tuesday. No one was injured and there was no damage, a ministry spokesman said.
He denied earlier reports by China's State Seismological Bureau that a massive earthquake measuring 7.4 had struck the former Soviet republic.