• Late night magnitude-6 quake comes as one of Afghanistan’s worst tremors.
• Rescue efforts focus on remote mountain areas, hindered by terrain, weather.
• WHO highlights overwhelmed local health system and aid delivery challenges.

Rescuers in Afghanistan will try to reach isolated villages in the eastern region of Kunar, the epicentre of an earthquake that killed over 800 people and injured more than 2,800, authorities told Reuters on Tuesday.

Rescue operations were carried out in four villages in Kunar on Monday after the quake struck and efforts will now be focused on reaching more remote mountain areas, said Ehsanullah Ehsan, the provincial head of disaster management.

“We cannot accurately predict how many bodies might still be trapped under the rubble,” said Ehsan. “Our effort is to complete these operations as soon as possible and to begin distributing aid to the affected families.”

One of Afghanistan’s worst earthquakes, with a magnitude of 6, struck around midnight local time on Monday, at a shallow depth of 10 km (6 miles), killing 812 people in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar.

Mountainous terrain and inclement weather have hindered rescuers reaching remote areas along the Pakistani border where the quake flattened mudbrick homes.

Gaining access for vehicles on the narrow mountain roads was the main obstacle for relief work, said Ehsan, adding machinery was being brought in to clear roads of debris.

On Tuesday, a line of ambulances was on the damaged mountain road trying to reach Kunar villages, as helicopters flew in, bringing aid supplies and taking the injured to hospitals, according to a Reuters witness.

Some of those injured have been transferred to hospitals in Kabul and the adjacent province of Nangarhar, said Ehsan.

Taliban soldiers were deployed in the area, providing help and security. The disaster has further stretched the war-torn nation’s Taliban administration, already grappling with a sharp drop in foreign aid and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Afghans by neighbouring countries.

“National and international organisations are present in the area, have organised their assistance, and, God willing, aid will be distributed in an orderly manner,” said Ehsan.

Rescue teams and authorities are trying to dispose of animal carcasses quickly so as to minimise the risk of contamination to water resources, a UN official said on Monday.

“Damaged roads, ongoing aftershocks, and remote locations of many villages severely impede the delivery of aid,” the World Health Organisation said in a situation update, adding that over 12,000 people had been affected by the quake.

“The pre-earthquake fragility of the health system means local capacity is overwhelmed, creating total dependence on external actors,” said the update.

Afghanistan is prone to deadly earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.

A 6.1-magnitude earthquake that killed 1,000 people in the eastern region in 2022 was the first major natural disaster faced by the Taliban government.

Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin took turns Monday to swipe at the West during a gathering of Eurasian leaders aimed at putting Beijing front and centre of regional relations.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)touts itself as a non-Western style of collaboration between 10 countries in the region and seeks to be an alternative to traditional alliances.

Xi told leaders, including Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and India´s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that the global situation was becoming more “chaotic and intertwined”.

The Chinese leader also slammed “bullying behaviour” from certain countries — a veiled reference to the United States.

“The security and development tasks facing member states have become even more challenging,” he said in his address in the northern port city of Tianjin.

“With the world undergoing turbulence and transformation, we must continue to follow the Shanghai spirit…and better perform the functions of the organisation.”

Putin used his speech to defend Russia´s Ukraine offensive, blaming the West for triggering the three-and-a-half-year conflict that has killed tens of thousands and devastated much of eastern Ukraine.

“This crisis wasn’t triggered by Russia´s attack on Ukraine, but was a result of a coup in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the West,” Putin said.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry urged China to work towards peace during Putin’s visit, saying in a statement from Kyiv they “would welcome a more active role” for Beijing to help find peace “based on respect for the UN Charter”.

Putin, meanwhile, praised Turkey’s mediation efforts in the conflict as he met Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

And Putin later met his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian, the Kremlin said, with the pair expected to discuss Iran’s nuclear programme.

‘Always insightful’

Earlier, leaders from the 10 countries — China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus — posed for a group photo on a red carpet.

Xi, Putin and Modi were seen chatting, flanked by their translators. Modi and Putin were photographed holding hands and held talks in the afternoon.

Russian state media reported the pair spent nearly an hour talking “face-to-face” in Putin’s armoured presidential car before an official meeting.

“Conversations with him are always insightful,” Modi posted on X alongside a photograph of them travelling in the car.

Before their meeting, Modi praised the “special and privileged strategic partnership” with Moscow and added that India wanted both sides in the Ukraine conflict to “find stable peace”.

‘Mutual trust’

The SCO summit kicked off on Sunday, days before a massive military parade in Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.

The member states signed a declaration on Monday agreeing to strengthen cooperation in sectors such as security and economy, China’s Xinhua news agency said.

Xinhua added that the leaders also admitted Laos as an observer country, or “dialogue partner” — the summit already has 16 observers.

Xi held a flurry of back-to-back meetings with leaders, including Lukashenko — one of Putin’s staunch allies — and Modi, who is on his first visit to China since 2018.

Modi told Xi that India was committed to taking “forward our ties based on mutual trust, dignity and sensitivity”.

The world’s two most populous nations are intense rivals, competing for influence across South Asia, and they fought a deadly border clash in 2020.

A thaw began last October, when Modi met Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.

Their rapprochement deepened as US President Donald Trump pressured both Asian economic giants with trade tariffs.

More than 20 leaders are attending the bloc´s largest meeting since it was founded in 2001.

Many of the assembled dignitaries will be in Beijing on Wednesday to watch the military parade, which will also be attended by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

A train carrying Kim passed into China early Tuesday, South Korea´s Yonhap news agency reported, citing the North´s state-run radio service.

LONDON: Indian nationals have emerged as the nationality with the largest percentage increase in convictions for sexual offences in the UK amid a wider surge in foreigners being sentenced for such crimes over the past four years in the country, according to an analysis of official British data by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC).

The think tank, citing UK Ministry of Justice figures, said convictions of Indian nationals rose by 257% between 2021 and 2024, even as overall foreign national convictions for sexual offences grew by 62% during the same period.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data has been drawn from the Police National Computer (PNC).

The CMC analysis showed that sexual offence convictions involving Indians rose from 28 cases in 2021 to 100 in 2024, an increase of 72 cases. Pakistanis are at the bottom of the nationalities for sexual convictions as Nigerians (166% increase), Iraqis (160%), Sudanese (117%) and Afghans (115%) made up the other nationalities with the steepest rises. Bangladeshis and Pakistanis featured in the data with rise of 100% and 47% respectively.

The report also highlighted that Indians ranked third in serious crime convictions, with a 115% increase between 2021 and 2024. The number of such convictions reached 588 in 2024, up from 273 in 2021. “There were almost 75,000 non-summary convictions of foreign nationals between 2021 and 2024… showing a general pattern of increase,” the CMC noted.

The findings come weeks after UK Home Office data showed a sharp rise in Indian nationals held in detention, almost doubling in the past year. Indians also emerged in the data as the second-largest group to receive study visas (98,014) and the largest for work and tourist visas to the UK. Last month, India was included in the expanded list of countries from which foreign offenders will be deported immediately after sentencing, before their appeals are heard.

The nationalities with the highest number of convictions for sexual offences last year were Indians (100), Romanians (92), Poles (83), Pakistanis (56), Afghans (43), Nigerians (40), Sudanese (37), Bangladeshi (34) and Portuguese (33).

The MoJ said the data should be treated with caution. It was possible for an offender to have multiple nationalities listed on the PNC, although they were recorded according to their “first” or “primary” nationality. One individual could also be responsible for multiple offences. Convictions by offenders where there was no declared nationality were excluded from the analysis.

Number of sexual offence convictions by foreign nationals in 2024

According to the data, the number of sex offence convictions for foreign nationals rose by 62%, from 687 in 2021 to 1,114 in 2024, compared with a 39.3% rise for British nationals, from 4,409 to 6,142.

The seven nationalities that accounted for about three quarters of the Channel crossings last year — Afghans, Syrians, Iranians, Vietnamese, Eritreans, Sudanese and Iraqis — saw a 110% increase in the number of sexual offence convictions between 2021 and 2024.

The total number of non-summary convictions of foreign nationals increased by 19.6% between 2021 and 2024, from 17,417 to 20,826. The number of convictions of British nationals increased by 5.9%, from 138,307 to 146,511. That means the number of convictions increased at three times the rate of convictions of Britons.

The nationalities with the highest number of non-summary convictions in 2024 were Romanians (3,271), Albanians (2,150), Poles (1,869), Irish (1,105), Lithuanians (737), Indians (588), Iranians (508), Bulgarians (489), Portuguese (485) and Algerians (472).

A government spokesman said: “Any foreign national who commits these kind of sexual offences in our country will face the full force of the law, and be deported at the earliest opportunity. And thanks to the reforms in our border security bill, any asylum claims they make will also be denied. This Government has already removed almost 5,200 foreign national offenders in its first year in office, a 14% increase on the previous 12 months, and we will continue to crack down on any foreign nationals who come to this country and break our rules.”