No deaths were immediately reported in the six nations where the quake, which registered 7.5 on the Richter scale, was felt, although witnesses said some poorly constructed homes in the DRC town of Kalemie had collapsed.

"Local residents say several people were slightly wounded when the quake hit," said an AFP correspondent near Kalemie, which lies about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the epicenter.

"Straw huts caught on fire ... and some mud brick houses collapsed on the outskirts," the correspondent said, citing eyewitness accounts from residents of the town.

Apart from the damage there, witnesses in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi said the temblor had caused cracks in at least two downtown office buildings that had swayed, sending thousands of workers fleeing into the streets.

In addition to the DRC and Kenya, it was felt in Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, according to residents who said there was no visible damage.

According to the the Observatory of Earth Sciences in the French city of Strasbourg and the US Geological Survey (USGS), the quake occured seconds before 12:20 GMT (3:20 pm local time in most of the affected countries).

They said the epicenter was on the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, the largest of the chain of bodies of water in the Rift Valley that forms the border between Tanzania and the DRC.

In the Ethiopian capital, where the quake was not felt, the seismology department at the University of Addis Ababa said the quake was the most powerful to hit the Rift Valley in a decade.

In Nairobi, some 900 kilometers (560 miles) away from the epicenter, and the port city of Mombasa, tall buildings swayed as the earth shook for some 15 seconds, sending thousands fleeing into the streets.

"The building started swaying, but I felt like it was me and I was going to faint," Nairobi secretary Winnie Achieng told AFP. "When I felt it again I rushed to the next office only to realise that people were rushing downstairs and that's when I knew something was wrong."

"I felt like I was going to fall off from my seat, then people in my office started shouting that there was a tremor," said Sandra Nsibirwa, a British Airways employee.

"I didn't have my shoes on at that time, so I rushed downstairs bare foot," said Nsibirwa who works at the airline's ticketing office on the 11th floor of a 13-storey building downtown.

In northern Tanzania, the quake forced the evacuation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which is trying suspects in that country's 1994 genocide, witnesses said.

In Rwanda itself, residents of the capital Kigali said they had felt the earth shaking as did witnesses in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, the Burundian capital of Bujumbura.

In Bujumbura, the outskirts of which border Lake Tanganyika, an AFP correspondent reported that the lake's waters appeared "more rough than normal" but said residents of the area had reported no damage.

As in Nairobi, Kampala and Arusha, large office buildings in Bujumbura were evacuated, the correspondent said.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the quake was felt but no damage reported in the 13 camps it runs near the epicenter in Tanzania for hundreds of thousands of refugees from Burundi, Rwanda and the

A geologist at the University of Nairobi said the quake was not entirely unexpected in the Rift Valley, the 5,000-kilometer (3,125-mile) long chasm formed by African and Arabian tectonic plates that runs from northern Syria through Africa to Mozambique.

"Recent studies have indicated that some parts in Rift Valley and Indian Ocean will be frequented by mudslides, tremors and eruptions," he told AFP.

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