Search and rescue teams rescued five members of the same family from the rubble of a Turkish city today, 129 hours after Monday’s earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northwestern Syria.
This morning, according to the Associated Press (AP) news agency, citing the HaberTurk radio station, rescue teams rescued mother and daughter, Havva and Fatmagul Aslan, from a pile of rubble in the city of Nurdag, in Gaziantep province.
Later, HaberTurk continued, teams reached the father, Hasan Aslan, who insisted that the other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra, be saved before him.
According to official data released today, more than 24,000 people died as a result of the earthquakes that shook Turkey and Syria on Monday.
According to Afad, a Turkish relief organization, 20,665 bodies have been removed from the rubble in Turkey so far, and 3,553 bodies have been counted in Syria, according to an official balance.
These figures bring to 24,218 the total deaths in the two countries struck by an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, which was followed by several aftershocks, one of them measuring 7.5.
This morning, the emergency teams also rescued several people who had been buried under rubble for more than 120 hours in different cities of Turkey.
Masallah Çiçek, a 55-year-old woman, was rescued alive from the ruins of her apartment in Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey, 122 hours after the earthquake.
Another rescue was broadcast live on Turkish television channels in the early hours of the morning, when another woman, Violet Tabak, 70, was pulled alive from a collapsed building in Kahramanmaras, in the south of the country, 121 hours after the earthquake.
However, hopes of finding more survivors are waning by the minute and rescue work has already stopped in some areas, with crews beginning to remove rubble.
AFAD, under the auspices of the Turkish Interior Ministry, said that around 160,000 search and rescue team members, including international teams and NGOs, are working in the affected areas.
The 53-member Portuguese team sent to Turkey is already operating search and rescue missions in the country, Interior Administration Minister José Luís Carneiro said on Friday.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths today announced a special grant of $25 million (23.3 million euros) to bolster relief efforts in Syria.
The funds, which come from the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund, will try to respond to the most urgent needs of the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the earthquakes, the UN said in a statement.
The Syrian government announced on Friday that it will accept international aid to be sent to areas controlled by rebel forces from areas under its control.
Source: TSF
