Strong earthquake shakes Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula

An earthquake of about magnitude 7 shook a remote area of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula early Sunday, a week after another strong quake had forced the evacuations of hundreds of people, officials said.

Photo: Strong earthquake shakes Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula

The earthquake hit about at about 4 a.m. Sunday (1700GMT Saturday) and its epicenter was near the village of Tilichki, said Natalia Korgun, a duty officer at the Russian seismological service station in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

There were no immediate casualties reported, said a duty officer of the Emergency Situations Ministry for Kamchatka, who did not give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the journalists.

Tilichki was one of the villages hardest hit by an April 21 quake that measured 7.7 Hundreds of people were evacuated to the regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky after that quake and it was not immediately clear how many people had remained in Tilichki.

The Kamchatka peninsula extends down from mainland Russia toward Japan, some 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) east of Moscow, reports AP.

O.Ch.