SEVERAL people are reported to have been killed after an earthquake hit the Philippines.
Thousands of others were forced to flee for safety after buildings shook in the capital Manila when the quake struck at around 5pm local time.
What was its magnitude and where did the quake hit?
The magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck 37 miles northwest, Manila, at a depth of 25 miles, said the U.S Geological Survey.
Lilia Pineda, the governor of Pampanga province on the Philippines main island of Luzon, told a radio station that several people had been killed.
The bodies of three people were pulled from a collapsed building in Pampanga and a grandmother and child died when they were pinned to the wall of another building in the same province, Bloomberg reported.
Tall buildings swayed in Manila's main business district and some people evacuated their offices.
Hundreds of office workers dashed out of buildings in panic, some wearing hard hats.
It was also reported some structures had collapsed and the Clark International Airport, a former U.S. military base, had suffered some damage and had closed.
The was closed temporarily because of damaged check-in counters, ceilings and parts of the departure area, airport official Jaime Melo said.
He added that seven people were slightly injured and more than 100 flights were cancelled.
Renato Solidum, who heads the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said the quake was centred near the town of Castillejos in Zambales province.
Aftershocks were still felt in Manila at least an hour after the original tremor.
Several areas in Luzon island including suffered power outages as the quake affected several power plants.
The Philippines is on the seismically active Pacific "Ring of Fire", a horse-shoe shaped band of volcanoes and fault lines circling the edges of the Pacific Ocean.
A magnitude 7.7 quake killed nearly 2,000 people in the northern Philippines in 1990.
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