At least 27 people have been killed in county near the epicenter of a strong earthquake that struck southwest China Monday, a local official said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, 327 others were injured and four more are still missing, said Gao Jiajun, head of Maoxian County, Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Aba, Sichuan Province.

Gao was reached by He Biao, deputy secretary-general of the Aba prefectural government, via satellite phone at about 4:38 AM, about 14 hours after the county was cut off from the outside world, according to a statement posted on the website of the prefectural government.

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked Wenchuan County, only about 40 km southwest of Maoxian, at 2:28 PM Monday. A number of aftershocks have been recorded.

Gao said that houses were toppled in Maoxian County, in addition to cut of roads, communications, and supplies of water and power.

"Landslides have also buried a tourist bus, but the casualties remain unknown," he said.

The exact number of casualties at the epicenter, Wenchuan County with a population of about 112,000, is hard to obtain as roads leading to the county had been destroyed by landslides and telecommunication links had also been cut.

But an official of Wenchuan had also managed to appeal for emergency aid via satellite phone early Tuesday, almost 11 hours after the county was cut off from the outside world.

"We are in urgent need of tents, food, medicine and satellite communications equipment through air drop. We also need medical workers to save the injured people here," Wang Bin, Communist Party secretary of Wenchuan County, told He Biao.

Latest figures show that at least 15 people were killed in Wenchuan, and 307 others injured, 36 severely, according to a statement posted on the website of the Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Aba, which administers Wenchuan.

"(But) there is still no news about the situation in the townships of Yingxiu, Wolong and Xuankou, which are located exactly at the epicenter," the statement said.

The three townships have a total population of more than 24,000, it said.

Wenchuan administers a total of 13 townships.

The Aba prefecture has pledged to restore the damaged roads and communication networks soon "by every possible means", according to a separate statement posted on its official website.

In Sichuan, nearly 10,000 people were feared dead.

The powerful tremor was also strongly felt in many other parts of the country, including Beijing, Shanghai and Tibet.

In regions neighboring Sichuan, 85 were killed in Shaanxi Province, 48 in Gansu Province, 50 in Chongqing municipality, one in Yunnan Province and one in Henan Province.

The quake was the worst to strike China since the Tangshan earthquake in north China's Hebei Province in 1976, which claimed 242,000 lives.

(Xinhua News Agency May 13, 2008)