People living in the town of of Kalemie, where at least one person was killed and two wounded when several buildings collapsed during Monday's quake, said the minor tremors came at intervals lasting as long as six hours.

"Everyone kept calm and people didn't leave the building but people are still nervous," Antoine Dema, an official with the DRC national railway company based in Kalemie, told AFP.

He and other residents said the aftershocks occurred at 10:00 p.m. Monday (2000 GMT Monday), just under eight hours after the main quake, and then again at 1:15 am Tuesday (2315 GMT Monday) and at 8:00 am Tuesday (0600 GMT).

Kalemie, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the epicenter of the quake under Lake Tanganiyka, appeared to be the worst hit locality in the six countries where the temblor was felt.

UN officials said they had no new reports of casualties in the town where a two-year-old child was died Monday of wounds caused by falling rubble from the collapse of his family's home.

"We don't have any new figures, but we are concerned that the aftershocks may have cause more structural damage to buildings in the town," said Michel Bonnardeaux, the spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Kinshasa.

"A number of them have cracks in the walls," he told AFP, adding that UN teams were expected to arrive in Kalemie later Tuesday to conduct a more detailed assessment of the temblor's impact.

The quake, which French geologists said registered 7.5 on the Richter scale and US geologists said was a magnitude 6.8, destroyed at least three buildings in Kalemie, two homes and a church, and shook buildings in cities throughout the region.

In addition to the DRC, the tremors were felt by residents of Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, although no significant damage was reported outside the eastern DRC.

The epicenter was under the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, the largest of the chain of bodies of water in the quake-prone Rift Valley that forms the border between Tanzania and the DRC.

The 5,000-kilometer (3,125-mile) long Rift Valley, that runs from northern Syria through Africa to Mozambique, is an active seismic zone and geologists warned that Monday's temblor had highlighted infrastructure vulnerabilities in the region despite the apparently minor damage it caused.

In Kenya, where the quake prompted thousands of office workers to flee swaying buildings in the capital, University of Nairobi professor Norbat Opiyo Oketch said the damage could have much worse.

"This was a very shallow quake that is why the waves were felt very far, but the most logical explanation why was damage was limited is the sparse population of the area near the epicentre," he added.

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