An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 has killed at least 20 people in eastern Turkey, The Guardian reports.

Hundreds of people have been left injured and several are trapped in the wreckage of toppled buildings. Rescue teams from neighbouring provinces were dispatched to the affected areas, working in the dark with floodlights, and defence minister Hulusi Akar said troops were on standby to help.

Sixteen people were killed in Elazig and four more in the neighbouring province of Malatya, Turkey’s disaster and emergency management authority (AFAD) said early on Saturday, January 25. Some 920 injured were in hospitals in the region, it said.

The quake struck at 8.55pm local time, 5.55pm GMT, at a depth of 6.7km near the town of Sivrice, the AFAD said. It was followed by several aftershocks, the strongest with magnitudes 5.4 and 5.1.

The Kandilli seismology centre in Istanbul said the quake measured 6.5, while the US Geological Survey gave the preliminary magnitude as 6.7, and said the quake affected not only Turkey but also Syria, Georgia and Armenia. Different earthquake monitoring-centres frequently give differing estimates.

Turkey sits on top of two major fault lines and earthquakes are frequent.

Two strong earthquakes struck north-west Turkey in 1999, killing around 18,000 people. A magnitude 6 earthquake killed 51 people in Elaziğ in 2010.