A young girl has been pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey, four days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.
ADVERTISEMENTA young girl has been pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in Turkey, four days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.
The girl, identified by local media as three-year-old Ayla Gezgin, had been trapped inside the rubble for 91 hours, since the earthquake struck in the Aegean Sea.
Rescuer Nusret Aksoy told reporters he heard a child scream before locating the girl next to a dishwasher, in the rubble of a collapsed building in the coastal city of Izmir.
He said Ayla waved at him, told him her name and said that she was okay.
She was then taken to an ambulance wrapped in a thermal blanket, amid the sound of cheers and applause from rescue workers.
Her rescue came a day after a 3-year-old and a 14-year-old girl were also pulled out alive from rubble in the city.
The death toll from the earthquake has now reached 102, after emergency workers retrieved more bodies.
The US Geological Survey rated the quake at 7.0 magnitude, although other agencies in Turkey recorded it as less severe.
The vast majority of the deaths and nearly 1,000 injuries occurred in Izmir.
Two teenagers also died and 19 people were injured on the Greek island of Samos, near the earthquake’s epicenter in the Aegean Sea.
Officials said 147 survivors were still hospitalised, and three of them were in serious condition.
Turkey is crisscrossed by fault lines and is prone to earthquakes. In 1999, two powerful quakes killed some 18,000 people in northwestern Turkey. Earthquakes are frequent in Greece as well.
In a rare show of unity amid months of tense bilateral relations, Greek and Turkish government officials issued mutual messages of solidarity over the quake toll.