Powerful quake hits in eastern Russia near Japan
Posted: 16 January 2009 0247 hrs

	Photos  of

MOSCOW : A powerful 7.3-magnitude earthquake has hit east of the Kuril Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which are disputed between Russia and Japan, the United States Geological Survey said Thursday.

The quake hit at 3:49 a.m. Friday (1749 GMT Thursday) at a location 428 kilometres (266 miles) east of the Russian town of Severokurilsk and 1,787 kilometres (1,111 miles) northeast of Tokyo, the USGS said on its website.

Officials issued a tsunami warning for the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on Russia's far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, RIA Novosti news agency reported.

"The tsunami station... has issued a warning in connection with the earthquake felt in Petropavlovsk," the regional office of Russia's emergency situations ministry was quoted as saying.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, with a population of around 200,000 people, is located 725 kilometres (451 miles) from the epicentre, according to USGS.

However the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in a bulletin that there was "no destructive widespread tsunami threat."

No casualties were reported in the Kuril Islands town of Yuzhnokurilsk, where the quake was only "weakly felt," an emergency official on Russia's Sakhalin Island was quoted as saying by RIA Novosti.

"I called Yuzhnokurilsk and got in touch with rescue services.... According to what they said, few people in the city felt the underground tremor. In their building, the quake was weakly felt," the official said.

The sparsely populated Kuril Islands are the subject of a long-running territorial dispute between Russia and Japan.

Tokyo claims four of the islands off Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, which were seized by Soviet troops in 1945 and have been held by Moscow ever since.

The dispute has kept Russia and Japan from signing a peace treaty to formally end World War II.


- AFP /ls