At least seven people were killed after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the coast of Indonesia’s Java Island, the country’s disaster agency said on Saturday night. The quake hit offshore about 45 kilometers southwest of Malang city in East Java in the afternoon. The epicenter of the quake was relatively deep 82 kilometers (50 miles) from the surface. 

“Seven people died and another sustained a serious injury,” Raditya Jati, a spokesman of National Disaster Mitigation Agency, adding that several villages in the region had been evacuated. It was not clear if the death toll would rise, but the agency did not report anyone missing after the strong quake. Images from the scene showed a ceiling caved in at a hospital ward and debris strewn across the floor of the local parliament in Blitar, a city southwest of Malang, reports AFP.

It was pretty strong and went for a long time. Everything was swaying... My heart was racing,” a Malang resident Magfiroh told the media. The deadly quake comes after Indonesia suffered from a cyclone that killed more than 200 people in the eastern part of the archipelago and neighboring East Timor this week.

Indonesia experiences frequent quakes and volcanic eruptions due to its position on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity where tectonic plates collide that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

Among Indonesia’s string of deadly quakes was a devastating 2004 tremor measuring 9.1-magnitude that struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, including about 170,000 in Indonesia.

Source: France24, AFP