3 year-old girl rescued from rubble 72 hours after Turkey’s earthquake
A three-year-old girl was rescued from a collapsed building in the western Turkish city of Izmir on Monday, nearly three days after a powerful earthquake in the Aegean Sea region killed 81 people.
Rescue efforts were continuing in eight buildings in Izmir where 79 people were killed, making Friday’s earthquake the deadliest in Turkey for nearly a decade.
Television footage showed the girl, Elif, being pulled from the rubble and carried by rescue workers on a stretcher to an ambulance, 65 hours after the earthquake struck.
Elif’s two sisters and brother were rescued along with their mother on Saturday, but one of the children subsequently died.
“A thousand thanks to you, my God. We have brought out our little one Elif from the apartment block,” Mehmet Gulluoglu, head of Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), wrote on Twitter.
More than 3,500 tents and 13,000 beds have been supplied to provide temporary shelter, according to AFAD, which said 962 people had been injured in Friday’s earthquake.
More than 740 victims have so far been discharged from hospitals, AFAD said.
It was the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since one in the eastern city of Van in 2011 which killed more than 500 people.
Turkey is crossed by fault lines and is prone to earthquakes.
In 1999, two powerful quakes killed 18,000 people in northwestern Turkey.
The Friday earthquake, which the Istanbul-based Kandilli Institute said had a magnitude of 6.9, was centred in the Aegean Sea, northeast of Samos.
PMNEWS
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