180 dead 1300 injured in Iran quakes

Twin devastating earthquakes in northwest Iran on Saturday killed 180 people and injured 1,300 others, the head of the regional natural disasters centre, Khalil Saie, told state television. He was updating a death toll he had given minutes earlier to the Fars newsagency in which he spoke of 146 killed. The quickly moving counts underlined the developing nature of the disaster in the quake zone, northeast of the city of Tabriz, as emergency workers recovered bodies and rescued survivors. The two temblors, registering 6.2 and 6.0 on the moment magnitude scale according to Tehran University's Seismological Centre, struck within minutes of each other, damaging scores of villages northeast of the city of Tabriz. The US Geological Survey, which monitors quakes worldwide, ranked them as more powerful than that, at 6.4 and 6.3, respectively.