Thai meteorologic department dropped the tsunami warning it had issued after a major earthquake rocked the Indian ocean Sunday night.

Although flood tide occurred three times in several southern provinces along the Andaman sea coast at around 0:30 am local time, there is no sign of the happening of a tsunami, said the meteorologic department.

The official warning came just before midnight on national television and broadcast on all channels.

People in the southern provinces such as Krabi, Phuket and Phangnga have been evacuated to higher land following the warning, local television reported.

"We've found no tsunami that could endanger people's lives or damage property therefore we now call off the alert," Plodprasob Surasawadee, head of the National Disaster Warning Center, said in a message broadcast on all television networks.

The quake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale struck the Nicobar Islands Sunday night, about 2,000 km east of India's east coast. No immediate casualties have been reported, said the Press Trust of India.

The epicenter of the quake, experienced at 9:12 p.m. (1542 GMT), was 60 km southwest of Nicobar Islands and 420 km from Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

In New Delhi, the central government said it was not issuing any tsunami alert as that could lead to unnecessary panic, but a close watch was being kept on the situation in the islands which is about 2,000 km off the mainland India.

Source: Xinhua