The massive tremor, which hit in the early hours of the morning, also destroyed a house in the eastern city of Jalalabad, a doctor in the city's hospital told AFP.

"So far we've received four wounded people, three of them slightly and only one woman was badly injured," doctor Ayoob Shinwari said.

The woman broke several bones when the ceiling of her home collapsed onto her, he said. The other three broke bones and hurt their heads when they fled their houses as the quake struck.

The epicentre was in Afghanistan's Badakshan province in the Hindu Kush mountains, a sparsely populated area of small, remote villages that has been jolted by several quakes in the past years.

Officials in Badakshan could not be reached for information about the effect of the quake although reports cited officials saying there had been no serious damage.

A government official in Kabul said earlier that preliminary reports indicated that no one had been hurt in any of Afghanistan's provinces.

"Preliminary reports taken from all the provinces were that there were no casualties. But we are asking them to check again," Afghanistan's interior ministry spokesman Yousuf Stanizai told AFP.

The tremor also shook northern Takhar province but caused no damage in the main city, Taluqan, although news had yet to filter in from the districts, the provincial governor Khwaja Kholam Abubakar told AFP.

"Inside of the city of Taluqan, we don't have any damage. We have not received any reports from the districts because they don't have phone lines and it takes time for the news to come to the city," he said.

The tremor also jolted northern Pakistan, where it triggered panic among residents who said it felt like the strongest tremor since a 7.6-magnitude earthquake on October 8 that killed more than 73,000 people in the area.

Government and United Nations humanitarian officials said they had received no reports about damage or casualties from any part of Pakistan.

"We have not received any reports about casualties or damage after last night's earthquake," a spokesman for Pakistan's Federal Relief Commission told

UN Humanitarian Coordinator Jan Vandemoortele told a news briefing in Islamabad that so far there were no reports about damage.

"We have not heard of any report of damage of casualty neither from the Afghan side nor from the (earthquake) affected areas," Vandemoortele said.

The Hindu Kush area where the quake hit is high in seismic activity, being near the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

An earthquake there in March 2002, which measured 6.1, killed around 1,000 people and destroyed several villages, according to the US Geological Survey.

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