BISHKEK: Rescuers toiled yesterday in a remote mountain village close to Kyrgyzstan’s border with China searching for survivors of a powerful earthquake that killed at least 74 people, 41 of them children.

Hours later, a powerful tremor also struck a sparsely populated area of China’s Himalayan region of Tibet, killing at least 30 people, Chinese state media reported.

The Kyrgyz quake, which measured 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey (USGS) and was felt hundreds of kilometers around, razed the village of Nura, located in the Tian Shan mountains at an altitude of 2,000 meters, said Kyrgyzstan’s Emergency Situations Minister Kamchybek Tashiyev.

“The picture we saw was frightening. The village of Nura is fully destroyed, 100 percent,” Tashiyev said.

The devastation in the village, from where rescuers were ferrying out the injured by helicopter, was graphically described by the head of Kyrgyzstan’s Institute of Seismology, Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov.

“These were dilapidated houses, made of clay and straw, so they were totally destroyed,” he told AFP.

An official in the press office of Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov confirmed the latest rise in the toll.

“The number of victims has reached 74,” the official told AFP.

Deputy Health Minister Madamin Karatayev said the dead included 41 children.

More than 60 people needed treatment in hospitals and 128 houses were ruined in the quake, which occurred overnight Sunday to yesterday and produced several aftershocks.

Shockwaves were felt in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, about 400 km away, while other tremors were felt both in Tibet and in northwest China.

Kyrgyz emergency officials said earlier more than 100 people had been injured in and around Nura, a village of some 960 residents close to the point where the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and China intersect.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offered his condolences in a telegram to his Kyrgyz counterpart Kurmanbek Bakiyev and a Russian rescue plane is due to deliver tents and other aid to Kyrgyzstan today.

Medvedev was himself due in Kyrgyzstan on Thursday for a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group of former Soviet republics.

Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous nation of five million people, is one of the poorest states of the former Soviet Union and lies in a seismically active region.

Yesterday’s deadly quake in Tibet struck an area about 85 km west of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa at 4:30 pm (0830 GMT), the USGS said.