Hundreds of people were wounded, many with fractured limbs, after the two quakes struck close together along the western Rift Valley fault.

Houses crumbled and deep cracks spread up the walls of buildings in the centre of Bukavu in DR Congo, near the epicentre of the first quake which measured 6.0 on the open-ended Richter scale.

It struck at 0734 GMT some 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the DR Congo town of Bukavu, while a second quake of 5.0 magnitude was recorded at 1056 GMT, Francois Lukaya of the Goma volcanological observatory in Nord-Kivu told AFP.

People ran out of churches packed for Sunday mass as the walls shook.

"According to the figures I have at the moment, 34 people are dead," said Rwandan local government minister Protais Musoni on Sunday afternoon.

Across the border to the east, Radio Rwanda said 10 people were killed "straight away when a church collapsed" in the Rusizi district of Western Province and 13 others died in Rusizi and Nyamesheke districts.

Local authorities in DR Congo said six people had died in the Sud-Kivu region, according to UN-sponsored Okapi radio.

Provincial health officer Manou Burole said 55 people had been wounded there.

Several dozen injured were admitted to the city's general hospital and at least 12 casualties to the Panzi hospital, medical sources said.

Radio Rwanda said 250 wounded were transported to various regional hospitals, and a witness in Rusizi district said public buses were used to transport the casualties.

Rwandan minister Musoni said that the provincial governor was on site and that the police and army were helping with rescue operations.

"Rescue operations are continuing to try to pull people out of the ruins of their houses," he said.

In the DR Congo town of Kabare, north of Bukavu, the walls of a church collapsed on the congregation during the mass, injuring 37, including five seriously, priest Leon Shamavu told AFP by telephone.

"People are panicking so much they're afraid to return home. They're afraid of being surprised by aftershocks and prefer to stay outside," a Rusizi resident told AFP.

The quakes were also strongly felt in neighbouring Burundi, south of Rwanda, Francois Lukaya, a scientist at the Goma observatory in North Kivu told AFP.

All Burundian hydroelectric dams stopped, causing a half-hour power cut, a water authority official said.

The quake and its aftershocks also shook the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, around 120 kilometres south of its epicentre.

"I felt a very strong shock shake my house. The walls shook really hard," a resident told AFP.

The first quake was one of the "biggest earthquakes ever recorded in the Kivu region," Lukaya told AFP.

A powerful 6.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the region in December 2005 but, while it is prone to seismic activity, it has mostly escaped major quake damage in recent years.

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