AKIPRESS.COM - Rescuers were struggling to reach quake-stricken regions in Pakistan and Afghanistan on Tuesday as officials said the combined death toll from the previous day's earthquake rose to 311.

According to Afghan and Pakistani officials, 237 people died in Pakistan and 74 in Afghanistan in the magnitude-7.5 quake, which was centered deep beneath the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan's sparsely populated Badakhshan province that borders Pakistan, Tajikistan and China, reports AP.

Afghan authorities were scrambling to access the hardest-hit areas near the epicenter, located 73 kilometers (45 miles) south of Fayzabad, the capital of Badakhshan province.

In Pakistan, the Swat Valley and areas around the Dir, Malakand and Shangla towns in the mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province were also hard-hit in the quake. The Pakistani town closest to the epicenter is Chitral while on the Afghan side it is the Jurm district of Badakhshan.

More than 2,000 people were injured in Monday's temblor, which also damaged nearly 2,500 homes in Pakistan, officials said.

In Afghanistan, Ismail Kawusi, spokesman for the Public Health Ministry said the numbers gathered so far from hospitals in various provinces recorded 457 injured. Earlier, Wais Ahmad Barmak, the Afghan minister for disaster management, said 74 people were dead and 266 had been injured.

Badakhshan's Governor Shah Waliullah Adeeb said that in all, 13 districts in the province had been affected, with more than 1,500 houses either destroyed or partially destroyed.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday visited the earthquake-hit town of Shangla in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where at least 49 people were killed and 80 were injured in the earthquake. Also Tuesday, Sharif attended a briefing in Islamabad about the damages caused by the quake.

Monday's quake shook buildings in the capital, Islamabad, and elsewhere in Pakistan and Afghanistan for up to 45 seconds in the early afternoon, creating cracks in walls and shutting down power.

In Afghanistan's Takhar province, 12 students at a girls' school were killed in a stampede as they fled a shaking building.