Quake jolts Indonesia

An earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter Scale struck beneath waters off Indonesia's eastern Maluku island chain early Sunday, but there were no casualties or damage, meteorology officials said. The quake, centred 255 kilometres (158 miles) southeast of Ambon, Maluku's provincial capital, struck 40 minutes after midnight (1540 GMT), said Wijayanto, an official with Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency. "People in Ambon didn't feel the tremor at all," he said. The quake was at the opposite end of the country and almost 2,600 kilometres away from magnitude-9.0 seismic thrust on December 26 which triggered a tsunami that killed more than 270,000 people on shorelines around the Indian Ocean.