A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 struck the southern African nation of Botswana today, US seismologists said, with the tremor felt in several neighbouring countries.
The epicentre of the quake, which hit at 7:40 pm (1740 GMT), was 238 kilometres (about 150 miles) northwest of Botswana's capital Gaborone, the US Geological Survey said.
It struck at a relatively shallow depth of 11 kilometres, and rumbled throughout the capital for about 30 seconds, an AFP correspondent said.
No reports on damages were immediately available.
The quake was also felt in several cities in South Africa as well as in Swaziland and Zimbabwe, several hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre, witnesses said.
"The bed started shaking, it was very scary, I didn't know what was going on," a resident of Durban, on the southeast coast of South Africa, told the News24 agency.
Earlier today, a smaller quake with a magnitude of 4.6 was recorded in northwestern South Africa.
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