Local authorities said more than 50 houses were destroyed in the northern province of Takhar but this had yet to be confirmed as the area was remote, a spokesman for the government's Department for Disaster Preparedness said.

There had been no reports of casualties, said the spokesman, Ahmad Shkeb.

The quake sent people running into the open in panic across mountainous, quake-prone areas in northeastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan and India, all of which have suffered devastating earthquakes in the past few years.

The governor of Badakshan province, which was at the epicentre of the quake estimated at a depth of 200 kilometres (124 miles) underground, said he had not heard of damage or casualties.

But it would take several hours for news to filter in from the outlying areas of the large province, governor Abdul Majid told AFP.

Badakshan was one of several areas where avalanches have been reported in the past days as winter snows melt and spring has brought heavy downpours to the usually parched country.

Avalanches in that province and in central Bamiyan had killed 23 over the past four days, the interior ministry announced Tuesday.

Another 91 had died in flooding, it said, with 19 of the nation's 34 provinces struck.

Nearly 4,500 head of livestock were killed with large swathes of farmland destroyed and roads and bridges washed away.

The heavy rains and melting snows caused the Kabul River, normally little more than a dirty stream, to overflow for the first time in about a decade.

About 500 homes and 100 businesses in Kabul were either destroyed or damaged, the International Organisation for Migration said.

It estimated about 900 families have been displaced and another 1,700 remained at risk in districts of the capital. About 1,200 affected families in the province of Parwan, north of Kabul, had been relocated to safety, it said.

The United Nations said Monday up to 25,000 people had been affected by floods and avalanches across the country and it was distributing 350,000 tons of food.

NATO's International Security Assistance Force, in Afghanistan to help fight the Taliban insurgents and to facilitate reconstruction, said it was airlifting humanitarian relief and doing aerial and engineering reconnaissance to assess the damage.

The earthquake also shook Pakistan, causing panic in areas flattened by a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in October 2005 which killed more than 73,000 people. There were no reports of casualties.

In Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir which suffered the most destruction in the quake two years ago, people ran into open areas and a man jumped from his office building, suffering minor injuries, witnesses said.

Indian-administered Kashmir was also jolted, sending residents dashing outdoors amid fears of a repeat of the October 2005 quake that killed 1,000 people in the area.

Afghanistan is often hit by earthquakes, especially around the Hindu Kush mountain range that is near the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, where seismic activity is high.

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