Scores of people killed after powerful earthquake, tsunami hit Indonesia

Jakarta: Scores of people were killed when a powerful quake and tsunami struck central Indonesia, an AFP photographer at the scene said on Saturday, as rescuers scrambled to reach the stricken region.

Photographs from Palu, home to around 350,000 on the coast of Sulawesi island, showed partially covered bodies on the ground near the shore, the morning after tsunami waves as high as 1.5 metres (five feet) slammed into the city.

The tsunami was triggered by a strong quake that brought down several buildings and sent locals fleeing their homes for higher ground as a churning wall of water crashed into Palu.

Dramatic video footage filmed from the top floor of a parking ramp in Palu, nearly 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the quake's epicentre, showed waves of water bring down several buildings and inundate a large mosque.

The shallow 7.5 magnitude tremor was more powerful than a series of quakes that killed hundreds on the Indonesian island of Lombok in July and August.

People living hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre reported feeling the massive shake, hours after a smaller jolt killed at least one person in the same part of the Southeast Asian archipelago.

The quake hit just off central Sulawesi at a depth of 10 kilometres just before 6:00 pm local time (1100 GMT), the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. Such shallow quakes tend to be more destructive.

"There are reports that many buildings collapsed in the earthquake," national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a statement.

"Residents panicked and scattered out of their homes."

Pictures supplied by the agency showed a badly damaged shopping mall in Palu where at least one floor had collapsed onto the storey below, while other photographs showed major damage to buildings and large cracks across pavements.

Search and rescue teams have been dispatched to hard-hit areas, Nugroho said.