A 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck off the city of Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island on September 30, 2009, killing scores of people and trapping thousands under rubble.

The disaster was the latest in a spate of natural and man-made calamities to hit Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 226 million people.

Two years earlier an 8.4-magnitude earthquake shook the country and was followed by more than a dozen aftershocks.

The quake, which struck on September 13, 2007, toppled hundreds of buildings and buried many people when it hit Sumatra, while later tremors hit Sulawesi.

Seismologists at the time said the region was lucky to have escaped a devastating tsunami, similar to the one triggered by the December 2004 quake that killed more than 280,000 people - some 165,000 of them in Indonesia. In this case, there was a tsunami, but it travelled southwest away from land.

Sumatra, with its dramatic canyons, lakes and volcanoes cloaked in lush jungle, is home to rhinos, elephants, tigers and leopards, although illegal logging and plantations threaten their habitat.

Bengkulu in western Sumatra, with a population of 1.6 million people, is a mountainous province that attracts few tourists. It's a key area for growing the robusta coffee that's used to produce instant coffee.

Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province, was controlled by the British for several years during the 18th and 19th centuries, and later the Dutch. West Sumatra province is home to 4.6 million people. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country.

Indonesia is prone to all kinds of natural disasters.

An earthquake on the island of Java killed almost 6,000 people in May 2006. Reaching further into the country's disaster history, about 15,000 were killed by a 1917 quake, and 15,000 died during a 1966 drought.

Average life expectancy
2005	69.7 years	UNDP - Human Development Report 2006
Child mortality - deaths before the age of five
2005	36 per 1,000 live births	UNICEF State of the World's Children 2007
Literacy
2005	90.4 percent	UNDP - Human Development Report 2006
Transparency International corruption ranking (1=least corrupt, 179=most corrupt)
2007	143 (joint)	Transparency International