JAKARTA (AP): A deep 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook eastern Indonesia on Saturday, sending residents running out of their homes, the Indonesian Meteorology and Geophysics Agency and witnesses said.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries and no tsunami alert was issued, said Suharjono, an agency spokesman.
The tremor struck at a depth of about 100 kilometers in Maluku province, about 2,700 kilometers east of the capital, Jakarta.
The U.S. Geological Survey put the quake at a magnitude 6.3.
Another nearby quake with magnitudes of 6.2 was felt several hundred kilometers (miles) away in East Timor, a witness said.
Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago with 17,500 islands, is prone to seismic upheavals because of its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.
A giant quake off Indonesia's Sumatra island in 2005 spawned the Asian tsunami and killed more than 230,000 people in 11 countries, more than half of them in Indonesia.
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