Scottish tourist Fraser Morton has told the Associated Press there was “panic” when the earthquake hit while he was shopping for camera equipment in a Bangkok shopping centre

All of a sudden the whole building began to move, immediately there was screaming and a lot of panic,” he said.

“I got outside and then looked up at the building and the whole building was moving, dust and debris, it was pretty intense.

Reuters has been speaking to people who experienced the earthquake in Mandalay.“I witnessed a five-storey building collapse in front of my eyes,” one Mandalay resident has told reporters.

“We all ran out of the house as everything started shaking … Everyone in my town is out on the road and no one dares to go back inside.”

A rescue worker from the Moe Saydanar charity group said it had retrieved at least 60 bodies from monasteries and buildings in Pyinmanar, near Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw, and more people were trapped.

In the purpose-built capital itself, a 1,000-bed hospital sustained damage and roads were left with huge fissures, state media reported.

The bodies of 30 people had been recovered from collapsed multi-story apartment blocks, according to a rescue worker from Amarapura, an ancient city and now a township of Mandalay.

“I have never experienced anything like this before — our town looks like a collapsed city,” he told Reuters, estimating that about a fifth of the buildings had been destroyed.

“We received calls for help from people from the inside, but we cannot help because we do not have enough manpower and machines to remove the debris, but we will not stop working”.

The Myanmar military’s promise to hold elections in December 2025 or January 2026 has been condemned as a “sham” that risks bringing even greater violence.

Myanmar’s military junta announced on Saturday, in comments reported in state media, that it would hold a long-promised election, specifying a timeframe for the first time since seizing power in a 2021 coup.

The coup was widely opposed by the public and prompted an armed resistance, plunging much of the country into conflict.

China, an ally of the military that has sought to protect its economic investments in the country, has previously expressed support for the election plans. However, most western countries and election watchdogs are highly unlikely to view the vote as credible.

Opposition parties are mostly either banned from contesting or boycott elections, while almost 22,000 political prisoners remain in detention, according to a local monitoring group, including Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was ousted in 2021. Her party, National League for Democracy (NLD), was dissolved for failing to re-register under an electoral law introduced after the coup.The Guardian view on Myanmar, four years on: the army unleashed terror, but the people are defiant

It is also unclear how the military would implement elections given that it has lost control of large swathes of the country to a patchwork of opposition groups that are fighting against its rule. Its territorial losses have been so severe that it was only able to conduct a full census, designed to prepare voter lists, in less than half (145) of the country’s 330 townships.