Editor/
A baby and his mother have been pulled alive from the rubble in Turkey an incredible 90 hours after a building collapsed around them in the latest miraculous rescue effort by heroic aid workers.
The 10-day-old boy, named Yagiz, had spent almost half his life stuck under slabs of concrete before he was extracted from the ruins of Turkey’s southern Hatay province.
Dramatic footage showed the child being carefully lifted out of the rubble and wrapped in a thermal blanket by paramedics, while his mother was strapped to a stretcher for fear of spinal injuries.
Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu – whose teams were reportedly involved in the rescue – lauded the efforts of rescue workers, saying the extraction took place in the town of Samandag.
Desperate search and rescue efforts are ongoing in both Turkey and neighbouring Syria with some quake victims still clinging to life beneath the debris.
This morning a family of six was saved in Iskenderun and a teenager was hauled free in Gaziantep more than 100 hours since the quakes erupted. One three-year-old girl was extracted alive after 103 hours stuck underground.
But hopes of finding many more survivors are rapidly dwindling, with dehydrated and injured victims also suffering bitter winter temperatures four days on from the disaster.
The death toll from the earthquake, which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called “the disaster of the century”, has risen to more than 21,000.
This total eclipses the more than 18,400 who died in the 2011 earthquake off Fukushima, Japan, that triggered a tsunami, and the estimated 18,000 people who died in a tremor near Istanbul in 1999.
The new figure, which is certain to rise, included more than 18,000 people in Turkey and more than 3,000 in civil war-torn Syria.
The scale of the devastation is scarcely believable, with entire neighbourhoods of high-rises reduced to twisted metal, pulverised concrete and exposed wires.
Even though experts say trapped people could survive for a week or more, the chances of finding survivors in the freezing temperatures are dimming.
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