GENEVA: The UN on Tuesday said the earthquake in eastern Afghanistan that has killed more than 900 people could impact “hundreds of thousands,” and warned of an “exponential” rise in casualties.
“We think potentially the impacted individuals would go up to almost into the hundreds of thousands,” Indrika Ratwatte, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Kabul.
Already, more than 900 people are known to have been killed and thousands injured in the 6.0-magnitude earthquake, which hit remote areas in mountainous provinces near the border with Pakistan around midnight Sunday, followed by at least five aftershocks.
“The numbers are definitely going to increase,” Ratwatte said, adding there was “no question that the casualty rate is going to be rather exponential.”
The earthquake’s epicenter was about 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the city of Jalalabad, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which said it struck around eight kilometers below the Earth’s surface.
