BISHKEK: Rescuers raced to reach a remote village in Kyrgyzstan on Monday after a strong earthquake killed at least 72 people in a mountainous area near the border with China, officials said.

The quake, which measured magnitude 6.6 according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), razed the village of Nura in the isolated Alaisky district, high in the Tian Shan mountain range.

"Right now the number of dead is 72," Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Turatbek Dzhunuchaliyev said at a press conference.

He added that more than 60 people needed urgent hospital treatment and 128 houses had been ruined in the quake, which was felt as far away as the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) away.

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

"The picture we saw was frightening. The village of Nura is fully destroyed, 100 percent," Emergency Situations Minister Kamchybek Tashiyev said.

"These were dilapidated houses, made of clay and straw, so they were totally destroyed," Kanatbek Abdrakhmatov, head of the Institute of Seismology in Bishkek, told AFP.

Victims were being ferried by helicopter from Nura to the main regional city of Osh, 220 kilometres away.

"The helicopter will make as many flights as needed to transport wounded people needing medical attention to the regional centre," said Tashiyev.

Rescue workers and doctors were also treating people on the scene and the International Committee of the Red Cross had given victims food, tents and blankets, Dzhunuchaliyev said.

But rescue efforts were being hampered by the remoteness of the village and a lack of telephone links with it, while roads had become impassable in some places due to the quake, officials said.

"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," said health ministry official Dinara Sagynbayeva.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the epicentre of the earthquake was 60 east-southeast of Sary-Tash at a depth of 27.6 kilometres.

An aftershock of magnitude 5.1 hit the region just over two hours later, the USGS said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev offered his condolences in a telegram to his Kyrgyz counterpart Kurmanbek Bakiyev and ordered Russian rescuers to assist the relief effort, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Medvedev was to visit Kyrgyzstan on Thursday for a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a grouping of former Soviet republics.

The meeting would go ahead on schedule despite the quake, Bakiyev's office said.

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.

In February 2003, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in northwest China, with an epicentre close to Kyrgyzstan in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains, claimed 268 lives and razed 20,000 houses.

Soon after Sunday's quake a moderate tremor with a magnitude of 5.7 hit China's far northwest, just over the border with Kyrgyzstan.

Two more earthquakes were recorded Monday, measuring 6.6 and 5.1 respectively, in the Himalayan region of Tibet, the US Geological Survey said, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

- AFP/yb/ir