The quake, which hit about 250 km southwest of Ende on Flores, was later revised down by the USGS to 5.9 magnitudes. There were no immediate tsunami alerts or reports of casualties or damage.
It happened four days after the country’s Central Sulawesi province was ravaged by two devastating quakes measuring 6.1 and 7.5 on the Richter scale. The second was followed by giant tsunami waves of up to 6 metres high in some areas.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) estimated some 190,000 Indonesian citizens in Central Sulawesi are in need of humanitarian aid. Among them, there are 46,000 children and 14,000 elderly victims.
The Indonesian government is making concerted efforts to bring food, aid and necessities to Sulawesi, while rescuers race against time to find victims trapped inside the debris.
As of October 1, the disasters have racked up a total of nearly 1,300 deaths and the casualties are believed to keep rising.
No Vietnamese has been reported dead or missing, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It also confirmed that 10 Vietnamese students studying at Tadulako University in Palu city are safe.
These are the latest natural disasters to hit Indonesia, which is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.
A series of earthquakes in July and August killed nearly 500 people on the holiday island of Lombok, hundreds of kilometres southwest of Sulawesi.
In December 2004, a massive 9.1-magnitude earthquake off the northern Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a tsunami across the Indian Ocean countries, killing 220,000 people in 13 countries, including more than 168,000 in Indonesia.–VNA
