A powerful earthquake shook Kyrgyzstan, close to China’s border. Sixty people were killed during the calamity, as the top emergency official of Kyrgyzstan announced on Monday. The former Soviet republic’s Emergency Situations Minister Kamchybek Tashiyev said that "according to preliminary figures, 60 people died and more than 100 locals were injured to various degrees."

The earthquake occurred on Sunday evening and hit the Alaisky district of southern Kyrgyzstan. The United States seismologists reported that the 6.6 magnitude earthquake started at 9:52 p.m. The destruction happened in Nura, which is a village of nearly 950 people, near the Kyrgyzstan's mountainous border with China.

Tashiyev added that "the picture we saw was frightening. The village of Nura is fully destroyed, 100 percent, there are many injured." The calamity broke down the electricity and telephone lines but special rescue crews hurried to the scene. Dinara Sagynbayeva, the health ministry official, stated that "efforts to assist the victims are being complicated by the distance of the villages... from hospitals, by a lack of communications and by the destruction of the roads."

The epicenter of the quake was 60 kilometers east-southeast of Sary-Tash and at a depth of 27.6 kilometers. Two hours later, an aftershock of magnitude 5.1 hit the area at about 12:27 a.m. on Monday. The former Soviet republic has a nation of 5 million residents and is one of the poorest states of the URSS.