Industry and Trade Minister Ali Coskun told Anatolia news agency that at least 84 people were confirmed dead and 390 injured in the quake which hit the mainly Kurdish province of Bingol in the dead of night.

Officials had earlier suggested the death toll would top 100.

Coskun said 118 primary school children were buried under tons of concrete after their four-storey boarding school collapsed in Celtiksuyu, on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Bingol, while about 50 pupils were pulled alive from under the debris.

A 12-year-old boy, who survived the disaster, begged rescuers to help fellow students.

"My friends were asking me to help them as I was being pulled out. They are still inside, save them," Anatolia quoted Veysel Dagdeviren as saying.

The cries of the trapped children could be heard from underneath the debris, according to the agency.

"I suddenly saw the ceiling crash closer to me. There was very little space left between me and the ceiling. The janitor of the school used the broken railings of the staircase to pull me out," another survivor, sixth-grader Mustafa Gunala, said.

Coskun expressed hope that the steel bunk beds and closets in the dormitory would withhold the falling debris, allowing rescue workers enough time to save the children.

"This is only our hope," he told Anatolia.

The quake, which measured 6.4 on the Richter scale, was the deadliest since 1999 when major tremors killed 20,000 people in the country's northwest.

A maths teacher was pulled alive from the rubble, but died on his way to hospital, television reports said.

Civil defence teams and soldiers swarmed over the concrete blocks, as hundreds of onlookers and weeping and wailing parents crowded around to follow the rescue effort, NTV footage showed.

Some relatives attempted to climb onto the wreckage to help in the search, but troops held them back. At least one bulldozer started to clear rubble from the building.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew to Bingol and was overseeing the rescue efforts at the boarding school.

Seven buildings, meanwhile, collapsed in Bingol city and rescue teams were also working on them, Coskun said.

Anatolia said 24 people had been pulled out from under collapsed buildings in Bingol.

Outlying villages also reported heavy damage, with electricity and phone lines down in many places.

About 20 people were injured in the nearby province of Batman, while a man died of heart attack in Diyarbakir.

Earlier Thursday, Housing Minister Zeki Ergezen put the estimated death toll at 150.

Some casualties were transferred to nearby provinces as staff at the main hospital in Bingol city treated patients in the grounds, for fear of aftershocks.

Erdogan said thousands of tents, blankets and teams, equipped with sniffer dogs, were being sent to the area.

The director of the Istanbul seismological institite, Gulay Barbarosoglu, said the quake, which struck at 3:27 am (0037 GMT) and was felt in several neighbouring provinces, had its epicentre 16 kilometres (10 miles) northeast of Bingol.

"Fortunately, this is not a densely-settled area," she said.

There was general panic after the tremor, with people rushing into the streets, according to scenes shown on television.

Barbarosoglu warned people not to enter damaged houses, which were still at risk of toppling in ongoing aftershocks.

"Some aftershock may be as strong as five on the Richter scale. It would be wise to stay away from damaged houses," she said.

The Strasbourg Observatory in France said the epicentre of the quake was situated in the Diyarbakir region at 38.94 degrees latitude and 40.90 longitude.

Turkey is criss-crossed by active faultlines, including one in northern Anatolia which caused two major quakes in August and November 1999, east of the Marmara Sea, killing 20,000.

Bingol is situated on the eastern Anatolia fault.

On May 22 1971 a quake measuring 6.8 on Richter claimed some 900 lives in the eastern province, according to Barbarosoglu.

SPACE.WIRE