Province Herat Financial News

Associated Press. The United States Geological Survey said the epicentre of the magnitude 6.3 quake was 40 kilometres (25 miles) northwest of the region's largest city Herat. It was later followed by three very strong aftershocks, measuring magnitude 6.3, 5.9 and 5.5 magnitude, as well as lesser shocks.

Click here! Meanwhile, Taliban officials has said that the Saturday's earthquake has killed more than 2,000 people across Herat province. According to the UN figures, the epicentre was in Zenda Jan district, where 1,294 people died, 1,688 were injured and every home was destroyed, as reported by Associated Press. A UN official also said that more than 90 percent of the people killed in the earthquake were women and children, as reported by AP.

Click here! Speaking of the damages and injurious caused by the quake, Information Ministry spokesman Abdul Wahid Rayan said that Wednesday’s quake has injured at least 80 people and a landslide has blocked the main Herat-Torghondi highway, as reported by Associated Press. Moreover, the report added that the landslide also flattened all 700 homes in Chahak village, which was untouched by the tremors of previous days.

The quake occurred at a shallow depth at around 05:10 am local time (00:40 GMT), with its epicentre about 29 kilometres north of the city of Herat, the United States Geological Survey said. Volunteers and rescuers have been working since Saturday in what are now last-ditch attempts to find survivors from the earlier series of earthquakes, which levelled entire villages and affected more than 12,000 people, according to UN estimates. Local and national officials have given conflicting counts of the number of dead and injured from the previous earthquakes, but the disaster ministry has said 2,053 people died. «We can't give exact numbers for dead and wounded as it is in flux,» said disaster management ministry spokesman Mullah Janan Sayeq. There were no immediate reports of new casualties after Wednesday's quake, which hit near Herat city, home to more than half a million people. The earlier earthquakes completely destroyed at least 11 villages in Herat province's Zenda Jan district, according to the UN. «Not a single house is left, not even a room where we could stay at night,» said 40-year-old Mohammad Naeem, who told AFP he lost 12 relatives, including his mother, after Saturday's earthquakes. «We can't live here anymore. You can see, our family got martyred here.

People are digging through the rubble from the quake in western Afghanistan

Click here! NCS is the nodal agency of the Government of India for monitoring of earthquake activity in the country. Earlier in September, two earthquakes of magnitude 4.4 and 4.3 had struck the Andaman Sea, NSC had said. According to NCS, the 4.4 earthquake had occurred at a depth of 93 km.

Taliban has now in a new verbal decree, banned women's beauty salons in Kabul and other provinces across the country, TOLO news has reported citing a spokesman for Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue, Mohammad Akif Mahajar. TOLO News is an Afghan news channel broadcasting from Kabul.

The Taliban authorities on Wednesday publically executed an Afghan convicted of murder -- the first time this has happened since the former insurgents took over Afghanistan last year, a spokesman said.

Police have closed down at least 16 cryptocurrency exchanges in the Herat province of western Afghanistan in the last week, according to a report in Ariana News, an independent news outlet in that country. The report quotes a local police official as saying arrests were made during the closures.