Strong earthquake kills at least 95 people in western China

A strong earthquake shook a mountainous region in western China near Nepal on Tuesday morning, killing at least ninety five people, state media said.

State broadcaster CCTV cited the Ministry of Emergency Management for the death toll but did not give details on the casualties. The magnitude 7.1 quake struck in a mountainous area in the Tibet region, near the border with Nepal, at a depth of about 10 kilometers (6 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said. China's earthquake monitoring agency recorded the magnitude as 6.8. The average altitude in the area around the epicenter is about 4,200 meters (13,800 feet), CCTV said. The CCTV online report said there were a handful of communities within 5 kilometers (3 miles of the epicenter, which was 380 kilometers (240 miles) from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

In Nepal, the earthquake sent residents running out of their homes in the capital, Kathmandu. Streets were filled with people woken up by the tremor. A 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed some 9,000 people and damaged about 1 million structures in Nepal in 2015.