At least 226 people have been killed in a powerful earthquake in Morocco, and the death toll is expected to rise. Rescue services have scrambled to reach the region, with the army joining in to help on the orders of King Mohammed VI. Mud-brick built villages around the tourist resort of Al Hoceima have been reduced to rubble, residents said. “The streets were full of women and children. The ambulances were filled with the injured,” one resident told BBC News Online by telephone. There are concerns for three villages near Al Hoceima where about 30,000 people live in mud-brick buildings not designed to withstand earthquakes. An unnamed spokesman told Reuters the town of Ait Kamara was “completely destroyed”. Panic Hossein Ben Ali, general manager of the Hotel General in Al Hoceima, told the BBC that the earthquake felt “twice as strong” as one that hit the region in 1994. Imad Marzaq, a civil servant in the city, said glasses fell and broke and pictures fell off the wall. “I panicked a bit, and I stayed in my bed. But the shaking didn’t stop, so I went to shelter under a table in my room,” he told BBC News Online. Al Hoceima – a predominantly Berber city of about 100,000 – seems to have escaped major damage, but wounded are flooding into its hospitals from the surrounding villages. “We have no idea how many dead there are,” a spokeswoman at the city’s main Mohammed V hospital told BBC News Online. “We are still receiving injured people and dead bodies.” Josephine Fields, a Red Cross/Red Crescent official in Tunis, said the aid agency had sent 200 relief personnel to the region. She told the BBC’s Newshour programme that local medical facilities were saturated and that the agency was considering flying field hospitals to the area. Mr Marzaq said wounded were being taken to Rabat because facilities in Al Hoceima were overwhelmed. “Ambulances can’t cope, people are ferrying the injured in their cars, in private ambulances, in 4x4s,” he said. Rescue A Moroccan rescue operation – including army and paramilitary police personnel with helicopters – has been sent to help survivors and to search for victims, Reuters said. France is reported to be preparing to send emergency teams if necessary. The area is mountainous and roads in the region are poor. The US Geological Survey measured the quake as having a magnitude of 6.5. European agencies put at 6.1 to 6.3. It struck at 0227GMT, the USGS said. The quake was felt as far away as Andalusia and Murcia in southern Spain, though no injuries or damage have been reported there. Al Hoceima was near the epicentre of Morocco’s last big earthquake, in 1990, which measured 6.0 on the Richter scale. Tuesday’s tremor comes nine months after a huge earthquake killed more than 2,000 people in neighbouring Algeria. Morocco’s most deadly earthquake killed about 12,000 people in 1960.