Six teams were being sent to the hardest-hit areas to provide emergency relief, the officials said.

Rustam Pakaya, the head of the health ministry's crisis centre, said as many as 112 people were hospitalised with injuries in Jakarta, where the tremor cracked some buildings and shattered windows.

The quake struck at 2.55 p.m. (0755 GMT) with its epicentre in the Indian Ocean, 142 km southwest of Tasikmalaya, 30 km beneath the seabed.

The US Geological Survey put the quake's magnitude at 7.4 but later revised it to 7.0.

Reports from several West Java cities and district towns said the powerful quake also cut electricity and telephone lines.

'All the people here panicked. I saw roofs falling down,' Lia Amalia, a visitor at a shopping mall in Bogor, about 60-km south of Jakarta, told detik.com online news service.

An 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck the southern coast of west Java in July 2006, killing more than 600 people and leaving tens of thousands of others homeless.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago nation, sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, which is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity because continental plates meet there.

A major earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck in December 2004, leaving more than 170,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia's Aceh province and half a million people homeless.