[An Nahar] More than 150 people were killed and 6,700 injured when a strong earthquake hit a mountainous part of southwestern China on Saturday, destroying thousands of homes and triggering landslides.The shallow earthquake struck Sichuan province on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau just after 8:00 am, prompting a major rescue operation in the same area where 87,000 people were reported dead or missing in a massive quake in 2008.
Nearly 17 hours after the quake hit Lushan county in the city of Ya'an, the corpse count stood at 160, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing the China Earthquake Administration which said 6,700 people had been injured.
At least 10,000 homes were destroyed, the Sichuan government said, as rescue workers searched through the rubble for survivors.
Local seismologists registered the quake at magnitude 7.0 while the U.S. Geological Survey gave it as 6.6. More than 840 aftershocks followed, Xinhua said.
The quake was felt in the lovely provincial capital Chengdu, which lies to the east, and even in the megacity of Chongqing several hundred kilometers (miles) away.
Panicked residents fled into the streets, some of them still in their slippers and pajamas.
"Members of my family were woken up. They were lying in bed when the strong shaking began and the wardrobes began shaking strongly," said a 43-year-old Chongqing resident surnamed Wang. "We grabbed our clothes and ran outside."
Xia Donghai, 48, a migrant worker in the northern province of Heibei rushed home to Lushan when his family failed to respond to his telephone calls after the earthquake.
"I am filled with terror, I do not know what I will find when I return to the family home," he told Agence La Belle France Presse.