Nasir Uddin Badal was having dinner at a restaurant in Marrakesh city of Morocco when the devastating earthquake struck the African country on Friday night (local time).

The 52-year-old Bangladeshi businessman first noticed the plate and cutlery on his table shaking at the eatery near the popular tourist spot Jemaa el-Fnaa square.

"Then it felt like the floor and everything else were shaking violently," he said, adding that he immediately ran to an open space close to the square.

Within moments, thousands of people, many of whom are tourists from across the world, gathered at the square. A team of police arrived minutes later and asked people to calm down and not leave the square, said Nasir, a resident of Moghbazar in Dhaka.

He arrived in Morocco on August 30 as a tourist, and was scheduled to leave the country today.

"My hotel is a five- or six-minute walk from the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. But the police would not allow anyone to leave. And they kept asking people to remain outdoors.

"After the tremor stopped, sirens from ambulances and fire trucks ripped through the midnight air. I tried getting my belongings from the hotel around 12:45am, over one and a half hours after the quake. But the hotel employees requested me to stay outside.

"While walking to the hotel, I saw the broken minaret of a mosque. There were large cracks on buildings. I spent the whole night out in the open.  The hotel staffers let me in at the break of day."

Nasir boarded a train around 6:50am and left for Casablanca.

The Bangladesh Embassy in Morocco said Bangladeshis in Morocco were unharmed.

"To our great relief, we found all Bangladeshi expatriates safe," Ummul Husnaeen, chargé d'affaires at the Bangladesh Embassy in Rabat, said in a WhatsApp message to this correspondent.

She added that the embassy was in touch with the Bangladeshis.

Around 50 Bangladeshis living in Morocco are enlisted with the embassy. Two of them are businessmen, one is a computer engineer and several others have blue-collar jobs.

According to the official, the capital city of Rabat is several hundred kilometres away from the epicentre.

The death toll from the earthquake crossed the 1,000-mark.