Another 1,265 people were injured in the quake which hit the province of Lorestan near the border with Iraq with a force of 6.0 on the Richter scale, state television quoted the Iranian interior ministry's natural disaster committe as saying.

Television footage showed survivors in some of the worst affected areas between the cities of Doroud and Brujerd digging through the rubble of their mud-brick homes.

About 330 villages suffered 40 to 100 percent damage, Lorestan provincial governor Mohammad Reza Mohseni Sani was quoted on state television as saying.

"By nightfall we will be able to give an accurate number of the casualties and the damage inflicted by the quake," he added.

State television reported that rescue workers have been sent to the most devastated areas in the province near the border with Iraq and that the number of casualties was expected to increase.

Survivors are in urgent need of food stuff, blankets and medical supplies, interior ministry public relations director Mojtaba Mir-Abdollahi told AFP, but said there was "no need for international aid."

"Currently the hospitals of the province are packed with injured, and the wounded are now being sent to neighbouring provinces," Mir-Abdollahi said.

"According to the inspection done by the local governor-general's office, the death toll is not expected to reach 100 people," he added.

Iran sits astride several major faults in the earth's crust, and is prone to frequent earthquakes, many of them devastating.

Media reported that the weather was now sunny, but that inhabitants of Dorud and Borujerd, terrified by the successive tremors, spent much of the night in parks in cool temperatures.

Some local reporters said that people in the area were not fully satisfied with the rescue operations

The tremor registering 6.0 on the Richter scale struck at 4:47 am (0117 GMT) following two others measuring 4.7 and 5.1, Iranian television quoted the national seismological institute as saying.

The Strasbourg observatory in eastern France announced an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale in western Iran at 0116 GMT. It situated the epicentre at 32.86 degrees north and 48.30 degrees east.

Iranian television said the quake caused an electricity blackout in Dorud where the inhabitants rushed out into the streets in panic.

The tremor was felt as far away as Hamedan in the province of the same name to the north.

The worst temblor in recent times hit Bam in the south of the country in December 2003, killing 31,000 people, about a quarter of the city's population, and destroying the city's ancient mud-built citadel.

The most recent quake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale shook a sparsely-populated region of south Iran on March 25, killing one person in a landslide and damaging houses in the mountainous Kouhshab region.

In November last year, 10 people were killed in a 6.0 quake on the Gulf island of Qeshm that was felt across the water in the United Arab Emirates.

The deadliest and most powerful quake to hit the country was in June 1990 in the northwestern provinces of Ghilan and Zandjan when about people were 37,000 killed and more than 100,000 injured. The quake had a magnitude of 7.7 and devastated hundreds of towns and villages.