People in the town of Kalemie, where at least one person, a child, was killed and five others wounded, when buildings collapsed during Monday's quake, said the minor tremors came at intervals of 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 pm 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).

Seismologists at the Observatory of Earth Sciences in Strasbourg, France said they had recorded at least one aftershock measuring 4.9 on the open-ended Richter scale at 0553 GMT.

Kalemie, a town of some 300,000 inhabitants about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the epicenter of the quake under Lake Tanganiyka, appeared to be the worst hit locality in the seven countries where the temblor was felt.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Kinshasa, which sent teams to Kalemie to assess the damage said a two-year-old had been killed, two other children wounded, one seriously, and three adults injured by falling debris.

"The provisional casualty toll from the Kalemie area is one infant who died last night from injuries after the collapse of a house, two children wounded, one in serious condition, and two adults lightly injured," OCHA said in a statement.

It added that four houses and a church on the town's outskirts had collapsed and that seven other buildings had been structurally damaged.

OCHA spokesman Michel Bonnardeaux said his colleagues were concerned that the aftershocks might weaken already damaged buildings.

"A number of them have cracks in the walls," he told AFP.

The initial quake, which French geologists said registered 7.5 on the Richter scale and US geologists said was a magnitude 6.8, shook towns, cities and villages throughout the region.

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

The US embassies in Lusaka and Dar es Salaam warned the quake could trigger a tsunami in Lake Tanganyika, the largest of the bodies of water in Africa's quake-prone Rift Valley.

However, no large waves were reported by shoredwelling residents who said the waters had only been slightly agitated by Monday's temblor.

The 5,000-kilometer (3,125-mile) long Rift Valley, that runs from northern Syria to Mozambique, is an active seismic zone and geologists said Monday's temblor highlighted the region's vulnerability despite the apparently minor damage.

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 been 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 told AFP.

"This should be a wake-up call to African governments to ensure that they have used available seismic data before licensing construction," said Oketch, the university's dean of science.

Geologists said that most residential and commercial premises in the region would have been unable to withstand a more direct hit.

"The consequences would be disastrous if an African city was the (quake's) focal point -- standing above an epicentre," Kenyan geologist Eliud Mathu told AFP. "More often than not, we are not consulted before building."

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