The quake struck at 7:55 am local time (0155 GMT) about 75 kilometres (46 miles) to the southeast of the Kyrgyz capital, but an AFP correspondent witnessed heavy shaking in the city centre.

A local official in the Cholpon Kochkor district of northern Kyrgyzstan where the quake had its epicentre, told local radio that initial inspections showed there was damage to homes and government buildings.

"There were small cracks in the walls and floors of the school and the ceiling and roof have partially collapsed in the arts centre in Cholpon," district head Nurbek Zhusypbek said.

But even as rescue officials sought to assess the damage, an aftershock rattled the remote and mountainous region.

"The second shock was registered at 10:17 am (0417 GMT) at the same location as the first. The quake registered 4.0 (on the Richter scale) at its source," a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry told AFP.

Neither emergency officials nor Zhusypbek reported any casualties from the quake or its aftershock.

Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked and mountainous nation of five million people, is one of the poorest states of the former Soviet Union and lies in a seismically active region.

Like its neighbours in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan has struggled to maintain its aging Soviet-era infrastructure, leading to concerns across the region that a major earthquake could cause considerable damage and loss of life.

An AFP reporter in Kazakhstan's business capital Almaty, 182 kilometres (113 miles) north of Bishkek, also witnessed shaking around the time of the first quake.

In 2008, an earthquake in the Kyrgyz village of Nura near the border with China killed 74 people, at least 41 of them children.

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