Two girls aged three and 14 have been pulled out alive from the rubble three days after a powerful earthquake decimated the Turkish city of Izmir.
The overall death toll from Friday's quake reached 85 after teams found more bodies overnight amid toppled buildings in the country's third-largest city.
A wounded three-year-old girl has been rescued Monday, days after a powerful magnitude 6.6 earthquake hit Turkey's Aegean coast.#elifperinçek #doğanlarapartmanı #izmir #turkey #türkiye pic.twitter.com/QYqAwd2yMW
— ANews (@anewscomtr) November 2, 2020
Rescue workers clapped as 14-year-old Idil Sirin was removed from the rubble, after being trapped for 58 hours. Her eight-year-old sister, Ipek, did not survive, NTV television reported.
Seven hours later, rescuers saved three-year-old Elif Perincek, whose mother, brother and two sisters had been rescued two days earlier. One of Elif's siblings later died.
The child spent 65 hours in the wreckage of her apartment and became the 106th person to be rescued alive, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
'A thousand thanks to you, my God. We have brought out our little one Elif from the apartment block,' Mehmet Gulluoglu, head of Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), wrote on Twitter.
Onlookers applauded as ambulances carrying the girls rushed to hospitals immediately after their rescue.
Close to a thousand people were injured in the quake, which was centred in the Aegean Sea, north-east of the Greek island of Samos. It killed two teenagers on Samos and injured at least 19 other people on the island.
There was some debate over the magnitude of the earthquake. The US Geological Survey rated it 7.0, while Istanbul's Kandilli Institute put it at 6.9 and Turkey's emergency management agency said it measured 6.6.
The quake triggered a small tsunami that hit Samos and the Seferihisar district of Izmir, drowning one elderly woman.
The tremors were felt across western Turkey, including in Istanbul as well as in the Greek capital of Athens. Hundreds of aftershocks followed.
Turkey has a mix of older buildings and cheap or illegal construction, which can lead to serious damage and deaths when earthquakes hit.
Regulations have been tightened in light of earthquakes to strengthen or demolish buildings and urban renewal is under way in Turkish cities, but it is not happening fast enough.
More than 3,500 tents and 13,000 beds have been supplied to provide temporary shelter, according to AFAD, which said 962 people had been injured in Friday's earthquake.
More than 740 victims have so far been discharged from hospitals, AFAD said.
It was the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since one in the eastern city of Van in 2011 which killed more than 500 people. A quake in January this year killed 41 people in the eastern province of Elazig.
Turkey sits on top of fault lines and is prone to earthquakes. In 1999, two powerful quakes killed some 18,000 people in north-western Turkey. Earthquakes are frequent in Greece as well.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
