Quake kills 376 in China

*37  civilians, 59 ‘terrorists’ killed in attack

A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck southwestern China yesterday, killing at least 376 people and leaving more than 180 missing and 1,400 injured in a remote area of Yunnan province, causing thousands of build­ings, including a school, to collapse.

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Geo­logical Survey said the quake registered at a shallow depth of less than 1 mile (1.6 km). Chinese state media said it was felt most strongly in Yun­nan as well as in the neighbor­ing provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan.

The official Xinhua news agency said the epicenter was in Longtoushan town in Yun­nan’s mountainous Ludian county. Communications have been seriously affected and rescuers have begun arriving on the scene, the report said.

Pictures posted online by state media showed troops stretchering people away and cars damaged by fallen bricks. Many people rushed out of buildings onto the street af­ter the quake hit, electricity supplies were cut and at least one school collapsed, Xinhua added, with more than 12,000 houses having collapsed and 30,000 sustaining damage.

Meanwhile, Chinese state media said yesterday that 37 civilians and 59 “terrorists” had been killed in an attack earlier in the week in Xinji­ang, home to China’s mainly Muslim Uighur minority.

The total toll makes the incident by far the bloodiest since rioting involving Ui­ghurs and members of China’s Han majority killed around 200 people in the regional  capital Urumqi in 2009.

Police had arrested 215 “terrorists” while 13 civilians were also wounded in Mon­day’s attack on a police sta­tion and government offices in Shache county, or Yarkand in the Uighur language, in Kashgar prefecture, accord­ing to the official Xinhua news agency.

It was the latest in a series of violent incidents over re­cent months in and connected with the vast resource-rich re­gion, where rights groups ac­cuse China’s government of cultural and religious repres­sion they say fuels unrest.