Hundreds of people killed in Afghan earthquake
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emergency crews are struggling to reach the mountainous eastern Kunar province of Afghanistan where the UN says more than 800 people have been killed in a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. We speak to the Afghan Red Crescent.
Also in the programme: China, India and Russia unite in their criticism of the West at a summit in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin; and why millions of people around the world who take an aspirin a day to ward off strokes and heart attacks might soon be taking a different drug.
(IMAGE: Afghan men search for their belongings amidst the rubble of a collapsed house after a deadly magnitude-6 earthquake that struck Afghanistan around midnight, in Dara Mazar, in Kunar province, Afghanistan, September 1, 2025 / CREDIT: Reuters/Stringer)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to NewsHour, direct from the BBC World Service in London. I'm Gary O'Donohue. |
| 0:08.8 | We begin the program in Afghanistan, where rescuers are attempting to get to a remote part of the northeast of the country, where an earthquake hit late on Sunday. |
| 0:19.3 | The epicentre was in the Kuna province, a mountainous |
| 0:22.4 | and hard to get to rural area boarding Pakistan. The most up-to-date figures we have suggest |
| 0:28.3 | more than 800 people have died with thousands being injured. Landslides have also destroyed |
| 0:34.4 | buildings and villages in the area. For the latest, I'm joined by the BBC's |
| 0:39.3 | Azaday Masiri, who's following events from neighbour in Pakistan. Asaday, tell us what the latest |
| 0:44.2 | issue have. Well, it's been very difficult to get information out of that area, given how remote |
| 0:50.2 | Kurnar province is. That's where most casualties are being reported from so far. But we do now |
| 0:55.3 | have this update from the UN's humanitarian agency, which says their preliminary reporting |
| 0:59.6 | suggests at least 800 people have died across four provinces. They've also said that at least |
| 1:06.3 | 2,000 people are estimated to be injured. And many of them, and this is the challenge, is that |
| 1:12.1 | they're in areas that are extremely mountainous, extremely rugged and difficult to access. |
| 1:17.2 | In fact, the BBC has also been told that this means the rescue operation was delayed, because |
| 1:22.2 | this happened in the early hours of the morning. More than 14 hours later, we're still hearing |
| 1:27.0 | that people are trapped |
| 1:28.1 | under the rubble. And helicopters, which were needed to access these areas, remember roads |
| 1:33.5 | have been blocked off by landslides, had difficulty, couldn't land in the dark. And so this is |
| 1:39.0 | very much an ongoing operation. Doctors have been saying that patients' casualties are still being brought in. |
| 1:46.1 | And so it's a very complex operation in a country that's already gone through so much |
| 1:49.5 | difficulty. And of course, as you said, this happened at night, so everyone was indoors. |
| 1:54.4 | Yes. And on top of that, this is an area where a lot of the homes are made from mud, stone, clay, materials that are |
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