A quake of that force can cause considerable to severe damage but there was no damage reported in Bucharest, even though people initially panicked.

The quake struck at 11:34 pm (2134 GMT) at a depth of 100 kilometersmiles), badly disrupting communications in the capital.

"The quake lasted about five minutes," an institute official, Adrian Grigore, told AFP.

Hundreds of Bucharest residents fled their homes in panic after the quake.

The temblor was also felt in Bulgarian border towns on the Danube river, in Varna on the Black Sea and to a lesser extent in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, Bulgarian radio said.

Gheorghe Marmureanu, director of the national seismological institute, said Romania could have a major earthquake of over 7.0 on the Richter scale, "before 2006."

Romania is along the line of two tectonic plates and gets major earthquakes every 30 to 40 years.

The two most recent deadly quakes were in 1940 and 1977, the latter hitting 7.2 on the Richter scale. It left 1,578 people dead, including 1,424 in Bucharest, and damages of two billion dollars.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.