Child rescued from rubble in Turkey, 65 hours after earthquake

Elif Perincek holds the thumb of a rescue worker as she is carried out of a collapsed building in Izmir, Turkey, following an earthquake

Credit: AFP

A three-year-old girl was rescued from a destroyed building in Turkey’s Izmir on Monday, three days after an earthquake in the Aegean killed at least 81 people.

Elif Perincek was wrapped in a foil blanket after being pulled from a collapsed apartment block, footage broadcast by Turkish channel TRT Haber showed.

Crowds of emergency workers and police then cheered wildly as she was carried to an ambulance, clasping the gloved thumb of a masked rescuer.

"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.

An emergency worker and the journalist interviewing him were overcome by emotion, both breaking into sobs as they discussed the successful rescue, more than 65 hours after Friday’s earthquake, which measured up to 7.0 in magnitude.

Ms Perincek’s mother and two siblings were rescued earlier but one of the children had subsequently died, Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said.

Centred in the Aegean between the Turkish coastal province of Izmir and the Greek island of Samos, the earthquake destroyed 17 buildings and killed 79 people in Izmir, making it the deadliest in Turkey for nearly a decade.

Two teenagers were also killed on Samos, which lies closer to the epicentre but suffered less damage.

Hours before the dramatic rescue of Ms Perincek, another girl was pulled alive from rubble in Izmir. Idil Sirin, 14, survived for 58 hours under a destroyed building, according to AFAD.

Over 100 people have been rescued from damaged buildings in Izmir, and on Sunday rescuers were still  searching for survivors at eight sites.

The earthquake injured 962 people in Turkey, AFAD said, while 740 patients have now been discharged from hospital.

The authority has recorded 900 aftershocks since the earthquake, including 42 over 4.0 magnitude.

It was the deadliest seismic event in Turkey since an earthquake in the eastern city of Van in 2011 killed about 600 people. A quake in January this year killed 41 people in the eastern province of Elazig.

Turkey is bisected by major fault lines in one of the world’s most active seismic zones. In 1999, two powerful quakes killed more than 17,000 people in the country’s northwest, including 1,000 in the capital Istanbul.