There was panic in several parts of the Caribbean on Thursday afternoon, as a powerful 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck. The Seismic Research Unit of the University of the West Indies said the quake occurred off the east coast of Martinique. French police said it caused buildings to collapse in Martinique and Guadeloupe. An Englishman died after suffering a heart attack, the civil security officials in Martinique said. Earlier, the Maritinique emergency services reported that two people had been seriously injured in the Lorrain district of the island. They had injured themselves because they had thrown themselves out of windows during the quake, said France's overseas minister Christian Estrosi from Paris. Estrosi told French television that about 100 people had required medical treatment on Martinique. The quake was also felt in neighbouring Dominica and St Lucia. Barbados sits outside the Eastern Caribbean chain and normally does not experience earth tremors. The tremor was also felt in Guyana. According to reports, people scampered into the streets in some parts of residential Georgetown. It also disrupted a sitting of the National Assembly, as the parliament building shook for about one minute. At the Presidential Complex, a press conference being held by President Bharrat Jagdeo was also disrupted. Mr Jagdeo stopped speaking but asked everyone present not to panic. BBC Caribbean reporters in Antigua, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago have also confirmed that the earthquake was felt in these islands as well. There have been unconfirmed reports that some buildings have collapsed in Martinique's capital, Fort-de-France. The earthquake was centred 40km (25 miles) north-west of Fort-de-France, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. 'Everything shook' "For the moment, a building and a bank have collapsed. There is panic, but we do not know if there are casualties," a police source in Fort-de-France told the French news agency AFP. Callers to Radio Martinique described their fear as the quake struck. "My house shook so hard I thought it was going to fall. The door, the windows, everything shook," the Associated Press reported one caller as saying. "I wouldn't expect major damage because the quake has some depth," Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado told AP. There were also reports that the islands of Guadeloupe and Dominica had felt the quake strongly. Residents on islands further across the eastern Caribbean - as far away as Puerto Rico to the north and Trinidad and Tobago to the south - told the USGS that they had felt the quake. The tremor was also felt hundreds of miles away in South America. In the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, 500 miles (800km) from the epicentre, some people evacuated office buildings Reprinted from bbccaribbean.com