Three people -among them a child who later died- were rescued alive this Saturday after 296 hours trapped under the rubble of a collapsed building in the Turkish city of Antioquia due to the strong earthquakes that devastated the region thirteen days ago.
As reported by the official Anadolu agency, a Kyrgyz rescue team managed to save Samir Muhammed Accar, his wife Ragda and their 12-year-old son, who had been left under the ruins of the apartment building where they lived.
Shortly after, the same source indicated that the child had died after his rescue, while the two adults were hospitalized with injuries of varying degrees. The bodies of two other children from the same family, who Anadolu says are not Turks, were recovered from the same ruins.
The nationality of these victims has not been revealed, but the media, based on their names, suggest that they are from Syria. Many of the 3.5 million Syrian refugees hosted by Turkey live in the affected Turkish region.
The Kyrgyzstan team is one of the few internationals remaining in the Eurasian country, as most have already returned to other countries.
The earthquakes of 7.7 and 7.6 degrees of magnitude that shook eleven provinces of Turkey last 6 days have caused the death of at least 39,772 people in this Eurasian country, according to what the Turkish Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, reported last night. .
Together with the close to 5,000 fatalities registered so far in Syria, the total figure now exceeds 45,000 and, according to experts, it will still rise considerably as tens of thousands of bodies remain under the rubble of the collapsed buildings, which makes these earthquakes the worst catastrophe in the region in more than a century.
