An infant died and at the very least one person was buried in a landslide after an earthquake hit the Indonesian Maluku islands

He added that a baby was among the many dead.

Earlier, local disaster agency officials said some victims were killed by falling debris and one person was buried in a landslide.

Officials said one other victim died of a heart attack as a consequence of shock, and one woman died after falling from her motorcycle while fleeing to higher ground.

Residents of Ambon, a city of about 400,000 people, helped injured residents wearing bloody clothes, and photos showed destroyed houses with collapsed partitions and debris strewn on the bottom.

Many people were woken up by the shaking…it felt like a truck was passing by.

Some patients fled a neighborhood hospital after the earthquake, prompting authorities to establish makeshift shelters outside the constructing, the official said.

“The effects were felt throughout Ambon city and surrounding areas,” said Rahmat Triyono, head of the earthquake and tsunami division on the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG). “A lot of people woke up because of the shaking…it felt like a truck was driving by.”

The United States Geological Survey said the earthquake occurred about 37 kilometers (23 mi) northeast of Ambon, Maluku Province, at a depth of 29 kilometers.

Triyono said at the very least two dozen aftershocks hit the realm, including one measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale.

A reporter from Ambon described scenes of panic as people fled their homes after the earthquake.

Architect Suryanto Soekarno said the development site where he and his employees were working was shaken by the quake.

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“It was a really strong shock,” he said. “The filing cabinets fell over and my employees ran for his or her lives. Some were injured, but thank God only with minor wounds.

According to Indonesia’s national disaster mitigation agency, initial reports said the quake hit offshore, but later evaluation showed it hit land, increasing the chance of harm.

The local head of BMKG Oral Sem Wilar appealed for calm.

“People panicked and began evacuating in some places, but we try to inform them that there isn’t any reason to panic because there isn’t any tsunami threat,” he said.

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The Southeast Asian archipelago is one of the crucial disaster-prone countries on Earth. Due to its location within the Pacific Ocean, the “Ring of Fire”, where tectonic plates collide, experiences frequent seismic and volcanic activity.

In August, five people were killed and a number of other injured in a strong undersea earthquake that hit the densely populated Indonesian island of Java.

Last 12 months, a 7.5-magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami in Palu on the island of Sulawesi left greater than 4,300 people dead or missing.

The force of the impact left entire neighborhoods flattened by liquefaction, a process during which the earth begins to behave like a liquid and absorbs it like quicksand.

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Nearly a 12 months after the double disaster, nearly 60,000 persons are still living in makeshift housing, the Red Cross said this week.

In 2004, a devastating 9.1-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra, triggering a tsunami that killed 220,000 people across the region, including about 170,000 in Indonesia.