KHARTOUM, Sudan -- Powerful aftershocks from this week's massive earthquake toppled government buildings and left more than 300,000 people homeless in southern Sudan but no deaths were reported, a government minister said Saturday.
A quake last Sunday measuring 7.5 on the Richter Scale struck rural areas 60 miles northeast of provincial capital Juba, 770 miles south of Khartoum.
More powerful than the quake that hit San Francisco last October, the temblor hit in such an isolated part of the country that it caused virtually no damage.
But strong aftershocks Thursday, Friday and Saturday toppled government buildings and razed houses, said Brig. Dominique Kasiano, member of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council. The shocks left more than 300,000 living in the open.
Thursday and Friday's quakes, measuring 6.8 and 7.1 respectively on the Richter scale, he said, struck at Terakeka, only 40 miles north of Juba on the west bank of the White Nile.
Saturday's aftershock was less powerful, said Khamis Sindani, deputy governor of Juba's Equatoria region. It knocked down houses in Juba, a city of about 250,000 people, but harmed no one, he said.
He said a commission was set up to assess damage. Western relief officials said it could be many days before the effects of Sunday's quake could be judged because southern Sudan has very few roads, virtually no telecommunications and is in the grip of a 7-year-old civil war.
Its annual rains, which make most southern roads impassable, are due to begin in June.
Kasiano, the political commissioner for the area, appealed to the Sudanese people and to friendly countries in the region for urgent assistance in coping with the 300,000 people whose homes, mostly huts and tin shanties, were flattened by the series of earthquakes.
Egyptian seismologists who recorded the original quake had predicted the aftershocks and attributed the temblors to volcanic activity in the area. Terakeka lies between the forested mountains that form Sudan's southern border and the thinly populated semi-marshlands that stretch away to the north along the Nile.
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