A 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck the remote Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia on Thursday morning, killing at least 20 people.
Indonesian officials said the quake, which was detected at 8:46 a.m. local time, did not present the threat of a tsunami. But it was classified as a “strong” earthquake in Ambon, a city of more than 300,000 people and the capital of Maluku Province. The United States Geological Survey said the epicenter was about 23 miles northeast of Ambon.
At least 20 people were killed in the quake, the authorities said, including a man who was killed when a building partially collapsed at an Islamic university in Ambon, according to Reuters. More than 100 people were reported injured in the quake, and the authorities said about 2,000 had been displaced from their homes.
It was not immediately known how many people were injured or how extensive the damage was across the islands, but the nation’s disaster management agency posted several photos and videos on Twitter showing cracked roads and damaged buildings. The nation’s meteorology, climate and geophysics agency reported at least 69 aftershocks, including one of magnitude 5.6.
Deadly earthquakes are common for Indonesia and its roughly 260 million people. In 2004, a tsunami generated by an earthquake largely destroyed the city of Banda Aceh, killing about 225,000 people in more than a dozen countries.
In 2018 alone, six quakes had at least a 6.0 magnitude. More than 4,300 people were killed in an earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Sulawesi in September 2018, and the previous month, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed more than 550 people when it struck the island of Lombok, near Bali.
