US predicts powerful quake this week

A Pakistani earthquake survivor walks past a collapsed mud house in the quake hit Mashkail area of southwestern Baluchistan province on April 18, 2013. More than 12,000 Pakistanis living in a remote, impoverished southwestern desert region near the Iranian border have been affected by this week's huge earthquake, a relief official said. (AFP)

Published Saturday, April 20, 2013

By Wam/Agencies

The National Center of Meteorology & Seismology (NCMS) of UAE issued a statement on Friday in which it denied rumors about the United States Geological Survey (USGS) predicting a powerful earthquake that will hit the region during the period between Thursday, April 25, and Tuesday, April 30.

"This is just a rumor. Earthquakes cannot be predicted," NCMS said.

On Friday, a major 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck off northern Japan on Friday, seismologists said, but no tsunami warning was issued.
The quake hit at 0305 GMT near the Russian-administered Kuril island chain, 1,490 kilometres (926 miles) north of Tokyo, the US Geological Survey said. It was 122 km deep.

On Thursday, A 5.2-magnitude earthquake hit northwestern Iran on Thursday, only days after a deadly temblor struck near the border with Pakistan, media reported citing the seismological centre at Tehran

The earthquake that shook a small town in Iran's northwest on Thursday afternoon injured two people, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The magnitude-5.2 quake shook the town of Tasooj on Thursday evening. The town is about 600 kilometers (370 miles) northwest of the capital, Tehran.

The spokesman of emergency department of East Azerbaijan Province, Habib Hasangholizadeh, told IRNA that the two injured people were taken to a hospital in Tasooj.

It was the third quake in Iran in the past 10 days. A magnitude-7.5 quake shook a sparsely populated area near the Pakistani border on Tuesday. A week before that, a magnitude-6.1 quake struck another part of the south, killing 37 people and injuring hundreds.

So far the Thursday quake has had 16 aftershocks ranging in magnitude from 2.1 to 4.1.

The U.S. Geological Survey put the magnitude of the original earthquake at 4.8.

Iran lies on seismic fault lines and experiences one slight quake a day on average.

In 2003, some 26,000 people were killed by a magnitude-6.6 quake that flattened the historic southeastern Iranian city of Bam.

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