skip to main content

Family pulled alive from rubble in Turkey

Thousands have spent the night in tents
Thousands have spent the night in tents

Rescuers have plucked a two-week-old baby girl, her mother and grandmother from the rubble of Turkey's earthquake.

Crowds cheered and applauded as 73-year-old Gulzade Karaduman was carried into an ambulance, hours after her tiny granddaughter Azra and then her daughter Seniha Karaduman were pulled free from the wreckage of the family home in the eastern town of Ercis.

Their rescue came as the death toll reached 459 and the Red Crescent warned that hundreds or even thousands of people remained buried under the debris from Sunday's quake.

"It is priceless to find someone alive and all my exhaustion is over," said Oytun Gulpinar, the leader of a team of rescuers who had arrived in Ercis after a 32-hour road journey from the western city of Izmir.

"I got to hold a 16-day-old baby, which is utterly priceless," he added.

Today rescuers also managed to save a 10-year-old boy from the wreckage of his house in the city center of Van, more than 54 hours after the quake hit.

Emergency teams earlier pulled a pregnant woman and her two children alive from the rubble in Ercis as they laboured through the night under search lights with the help of sniffer dogs.

''Hundreds, possibly thousands of people are still trapped under the rubble," said Jessica Sallabank, a spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

The IFRC said that 2,256 buildings - mostly apartments - were destroyed during the quake which struck on Sunday afternoon with its epicentre in the eastern province of Van.

An update from emergency services put the death toll at 459, with more than 1,350 injured.

The population of the region is mainly Kurdish and the quake came amid a major army operation targeting the separatist PKK militia in response to a series of deadly attacks.

In a sign of the simmering ethnic tensions, dozens of residents of the provincial capital Van hurled stones at journalists and police today after a well-known television presenter criticised Kurds' appeals for help.

Police used pepper gas to disperse the angry crowd, but there were complaints among survivors in other areas that soldiers whose barracks had been damaged were being given priority in the aid effort.

Prisoners at a prison in the suburbs of Van set their blankets on fire, demanding that they be moved to a safer location, according to relatives.

Meanwhile, many people who lost their homes are spending another night outside in freezing temperatures.