MANADO, Indonesia - A powerful earthquake in northeastern Indonesia left four people dead and four injured when it rattled buildings, causing panicked residents to flee homes, churches and shopping malls, officials and witnesses said Monday.
Three men died after collapsing as they fled their houses Sunday in the seaside Tuminting neighbourhood in northern Manado, a regional capital on Sulawesi Island, said Hani Solang, a subdistrict chief.
The fourth dead victim was a woman who suffered a heart attack, apparently triggered by the shock of the quake. Among the injured was a man who broke his leg after jumping from the fourth floor of a building, said a doctor in Manado.
The U.S. Geological Survey put the earthquake at magnitude 7.3 and the Indonesian seismological institute issued a tsunami alert via television and radio, but the feared wave never came.
The quake struck six miles beneath the Molucca Sea and was centred about 130 kilometres from the Maluku capital of Ternate and 2,250 kilometres northeast of the capital of Jakarta, the USGS said.
Some buildings in Manado were left with cracks and other damage. Tsunami fears sent hundreds of people running inland to higher ground or racing off in cars and on motorcycles, causing massive traffic jams, witnesses said.
Indonesia is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire,'' an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
In December 2004, a massive earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island triggered a tsunami that battered much of the Indian Ocean coastline and killed more than 230,000 people -- 131,000 of them in Indonesia's Aceh province alone.
A tsunami off Java island last year killed nearly 5,000.
