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Earthquake in Aegean Sea Kills 2 Tourists

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A 22-year-old Swede and a 39-year-old Turk died when a bar collapsed on the Greek island of Kos. The temblor also damaged the Turkish resort city of Bodrum.
ATHENS — A powerful earthquake in the Aegean Sea killed two tourists on the Greek island of Kos early Friday and injured dozens of other people, several seriously, the Greek police said.
The quake also caused scores of injuries and property damage, including flooding, in the Turkish resort city of Bodrum.
There were different initial estimates of the preliminary magnitude of the tremor, which was centered between Kos and the nearby Aegean coast of Turkey. The Institute of Geodynamics at the National Observatory of Athens put it at 6.4, while the Kandilli Observatory in Istanbul put it at 6.6. The Institute of Geodynamics later revised its figure to 6.6.
The quake struck at 1.30 a.m. local time, as many visitors to Kos, a popular summer destination, were enjoying a night out.
Two men — a 22-year-old Swede and a 39-year-old Turk — died when the White Corner, a bar in which they had been drinking in the old town, partially collapsed, according to Petros Vasilakis, a Greek police spokesman for the southern Aegean region.
Dozens more were injured, seven seriously, according to Mr. Vasilakis, who said that some of those affected were Greeks and some were tourists. He added that one man had lost his legs. Military helicopters moved the seriously injured to hospitals on the nearby islands of Rhodes and Crete, and in Athens.
The extent of the damage caused by the earthquake was unclear, but it did not appear to have leveled as many buildings as a similarly strong temblor that hit the island of Lesbos, in the northern Aegean, last month. Apart from the bar that collapsed, the quake on Friday also destroyed a church and a mosque.
Greek television showed footage of deep cracks in roads and damage to the island’s main port.
According to Greece’s deputy shipping minister, Nektarios Santorinios, it will take three to four days for the port to be functional again. In the meantime, passenger ferries were being diverted to nearby islands. In comments to the Greek television channel Skai, Mr. Santorinios said residential areas had largely been unaffected by the quake, with damage concentrated in and around the old town.
Turkish television images, replayed on Greek channels, showed damage to roads and people waiting on the streets on the Turkish side, while reports indicated that a small number of people there had suffered minor injuries.

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