Even as hopes of reaching survivors began to fade, rescuers in the Turkish city of Izmir pulled a young girl out alive from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building on Tuesday, four days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.
Wrapped in a thermal blanket, the girl taken into an ambulance on a stretcher to the sounds of applause and chants from rescue workers and onlookers.
Health Media Fahrettin Koca identified her as 3-year-old Ayda Gezgin on Twitter and shared a video of her inside the ambulance. The child had been trapped inside the rubble for 91 hours since Friday’s quake struck in the Aegean Sea and was the 107th person to have been pulled out of collapse buildings alive.
After she was pulled from the rubble, little Ayda called out for her mother, in video of the rescue broadcast on television.
But Ayda’s mother did not survive. Her body was found amid the wreckage hours later. Her brother and father were not inside the building at the time of the quake.
Her rescue came a day after a 3-year-old girl and a 14-year-old girl were also pulled out alive from collapsed buildings in Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city.
The vast majority of the deaths and some 1,000 injuries occurred in Izmir, Turkey. Two teenagers also died and 19 people were injured on the Greek island of Samos, near the quake’s epicenter in the Aegean Sea.
READ MORE: Three-year-old girl pulled alive from rubble days after deadly Aegean earthquake
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The quake also triggered a small tsunami that hit Samos and the Seferihisar district of Izmir province, where one elderly woman drowned. The tremors were felt across western Turkey, as well as in the Greek capital of Athens. Hundreds of aftershocks followed.
Officials said 147 quake survivors were still hospitalized, and three of them were in serious condition.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “to offer my condolences for the tragic loss of life from the earthquake that struck both our countries.”
The Greek leader added, “Whatever our differences, these are times when our people need to stand together.”
Sourced By: Associated Press
