Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Saturday that Germany is sending an expert team to Chile to find out how it could offer technical assistance to the South American nation hit by a powerful earthquake early Saturday morning.

In a statement issued on Saturday, Westerwelle also expressed condolences to victims of the magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile which reportedly has killed at least 214 people so far.

The expert team is from the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief, a disaster relief organization with tasks such as providing technical or humanitarian relief in foreign countries as assigned by the government.

(Xinhua News Agency February 28, 2010)