Quake hits Afghan, Pakistan, India - no injuries
 
KABUL, Feb 25 (Reuters) - A strong earthquake rocked Afghanistan and northern parts of neighbouring Pakistan and India on Sunday, spreading fear across the region but causing no damage or casualties, authorities said.

A government seismic centre in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar said the quake measured 6.2 on the Richter scale and was centred some 300 km (185 miles) north of there in the Hindukush mountain range in Afghanistan.

People ran out of their homes in biting early morning cold in the Afghan capital Kabul as the tremor jolted the war-shattered city, witnesses said.

People living in multi-storey buildings in Pakistan's capital Islamabad and the nearby city of Rawalpindi also fled out into the open after the tremors struck at 7:22 a.m. (0222 GMT).

The quake was also felt in in the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province, Lahore.
Frightened residents of India's capital New Delhi also scrambled out of their homes, witnesses said.

But no tremors were felt in India's western Gujarat state where the country's worst quake, measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale, killed at least 30,000 people a month ago.

NO REPORTS OF DAMAGE

Sources in Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement and the northern-based opposition alliance said hours after the quake they had no reports of damage or casualties in any part of the country, which is prone to devastating earthquakes.

At least 9,000 people have been killed by earthquakes in recent years in the northeastern Afghan provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan, which officials said seemed to have been the epicentre of Sunday's quake.

Initial checks by the Pakistan-based office of the United Nations Coordinator for Afghanistan also came up with no reports of any damage, an officer there said.

Pakistan's state-run APP news agency also said there had been no report of any injuries or damage.

At the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado, geophysicist Bill Smith put the epicentre of the quake 80 km (50 miles) south-southeast of Faizabad, capital of opposition-controlled Badakhshan province, at a latitude of 36.4 degrees North and longitude of 70.9 degrees East.

Smith told Reuters the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.1 on the Richter scale, and that indications were it was 180 to 200 km (112 to 120 miles) deep.
"If it's that deep, it should not cause much damage," he said.

The Pakistani seismic centre initially put the quake's strength at 6.0 on the Richter scale but later revised it to 6.2.

An official of the Indian Meteorological Department said earlier the tremor registered 6.7 on the Richter scale.