The quake struck the island chain about 440 kilometres (275 miles) northwest of Indonesia's tsunami-hit city of Banda Aceh at around 9:12 pm (1542 GMT) Sunday, the US Geological Survey said.

The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center responded by issuing a bulletin warning about potentially "destructive" tsunamis within a few hundred kilometres of the epicentre.

This was soon followed by similar alerts in Indonesia and Thailand, where people went into evacuation mode on the southwest tourist coast badly hit by the December 26 tsunami disaster that killed about 217,000 people around the region.

Andaman and Nicobar Islands governor Ram Kapse said the earthquake caused people to flee their homes in panic.

"The earthquake was felt in the 572 islands that form the Andaman and Nicobar chain of islands. It lasted for about three seconds," said Kapse.

The Indian government said later however that no damage had been reported in the archipelago and that there was no sign of a significant rise in water levels.

"The latest information we have from the naval authorities in (Andaman and Nicobar Islands capital) Port Blair is that there is no untoward activity in the sea," Indian Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said.

"The current situation on the ground does not justify a tsunami warning," said Sibal.

"There is nothing to worry about at the moment. We are keeping a vigil and there is no rise in the sea to suggest a tsunami is waiting to hit."

The tsunami-hit Andaman and Nicobar archipelago has been hit by a series of major aftershocks since the December 26 tsunamis that claimed about 5,500 lives in the islands.

The latest tremor was felt as far away as Thailand's resort island of Phuket, Indonesia's Banda Aceh and in Sri Lanka, which were also badly hit on December 26.

The director of Thailand's National Disaster Warning Center, Plodprasop Surasawadi, went on national television to issue a tsunami warning for the country's southwest coast, but the alarm was lifted 90 minutes later.

But not before police, governors of coastal provinces, emergency services and residents and tourists had sprung into action

Officials said evacuations had taken place at Baan Nam Khem, a fishing village nearly wiped off the map on December 26, and Phuket, where Western tourists joined locals on hillsides to escape any potential waves.

Indonesian authorities also issued a tsunami warning after Sunday night's quake, but they said any waves were unlikely to affect the country's shores.

"A warning has been sent to our office in Banda Aceh and they are transmitting it to the relevant institutions there" including the military and the police, Meteorology and Geophysics Agency duty officer Rahmat told AFP.

But "judging from the location, there is a very little likelihood that there will be an effect on our shores but we still have to be alert," said Rahmat, who goes by one name.

The authorities in Sri Lanka, where at least 31,000 people were killed in December, said mild tremors had been felt in some parts of the island but that there was no threat of a tsunami.

A.K Shukla, director of the Earthquake Risk Centre in New Delhi, said the temblor was an aftershock from December's devastating 9.3 Richter scale earthquake.

"It is fair to say that this earthquake is an aftershock of the December 26 undersea quake. There is no unusual condition in the sea," he added.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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