5.8 magnitude quake hits S. Iran, 4 injured
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At least four people were injured during an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale that hit southern Iran's Fars Province near the Persian Gulf coast at 1938 GMT on Tuesday.
Disaster Chief of Staff and Head of Hormozgan Crisis Center Ahmad Gheibi told Xinhua at least four were injured in Kemeshk, a town near the border between Hormozgan province and Fars province, and more casualties are expected in the regions around the epicenter in the city of Ahl.
Officials say emergency aid teams are ready, and will be dispatched to the quake-hit area if necessary, the local satellite channel Press TV said on Wednesday.
The earthquake, at a depth of 9 kilometers, is 27 degrees North Latitude and 53.9 degrees East Longitude, according to the Iranian Seismological Center's website.
Earlier in the day the U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake is at a depth of about 34 kilometers, and was centered about 234 kilometers west of Bandar-e Abbas.
Within 21 minutes after the magnitude-5.8 quake, another two earthquakes measuring 5.2 and 4.1 struck Fars province in succession, the Iranian Seismological Center said on its website.
Iran, including its capital Tehran, sits astride several major fault-lines in the earth's crust, and is prone to frequent earthquakes.
Local media reports said the last deadly quake in Iran occurred in September 2008, when a magnitude-6.1 earthquake killed at least 7 people and injured almost 47 others in the southern Hormozgan province.
The worst quake happened in recent years was a magnitude-6.3 one, which struck the southern city of Bam in December 2003, killing 31,000 people, about a quarter of the city's population, and destroying an ancient mud-built citadel.
Some Iranian officials suggest to move the capital from Tehran to some other places. The idea of shifting the capital away from Tehran is not something new, and related preliminary planning was done in the late 1980s and again in the early 1990s.
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