A team of Romanian rescuers managed to pull 35-year-old Mustafa from the rubble of the building, Turkish television network CNN Turk reported, some 149 hours after the earthquake.
Rescuers today pulled a 35-year-old man alive from the rubble in Turkey’s Hatay province, six days after Monday’s deadly earthquake, as the death toll in Turkey and Syria has surpassed 28,000 and is expected to rise.
A team of Romanian rescuers managed to pull 35-year-old Mustafa from the rubble of the building, Turkish television network CNN Turk reported, some 149 hours after the earthquake.
“His health is good, he was talking,” said one of the rescuers. “He was saying ‘get me out of here quickly, I’m claustrophobic’,” he added.
Yesterday Saturday the rescuer Gizem from the southeastern province of Sanliurfa said she saw people looting in Antakya. “We can’t intervene as most of them are holding knives.”
Police and soldiers are trying to maintain order, control traffic and help with rescue and food distribution operations.
According to the Turkish authorities, around 80,000 people are hospitalized, while the homeless have exceeded one million.
With basic infrastructure destroyed, survivors worry about disease outbreaks.
“If people don’t die here, under the debris, they will die from the injuries. Different from diseases,” Gizem emphasized. “There are no toilets here. It’s a big problem.”
For his part, Martin Griffiths, in charge of humanitarian operations of the UN, described the earthquake as the worst event that has happened in the region in a century, while he predicted that the number of dead “will at least double”.
“I think it’s hard to estimate (the death toll) accurately,” however, “I’m sure it will double, if not even more,” Griffiths told Sky News television.
The earthquake is the seventh deadliest disaster on record this century, with a death toll close to that of the 2003 earthquake in Iran, which killed 31,000 people.
So far, the official tallies speak of 24,617 dead in Turkey and more than 3,500 dead in Syria, but the figures have not been updated since Friday.
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited Aleppo in Syria and described the disaster as “heartbreaking”.
RES-EMP
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