An 18-year-old university student was pulled out injured, but alive from the ruins of an apartment building early today, 61 hours after the devastating Turkey earthquake.
Anatolia news agency said rescue workers evacuated Eyup Erdem from the wreckage of a multi-storey building.
The news agency said his father, Salih Erdem, was hoping for good news from his son after the magnitude-7.2 quake struck eastern Turkey on Sunday afternoon. He said his son moved to the town of Ercis a month ago to study mechanics at a university.
Eyup was sharing an apartment with other students.
The quake has killed at least 459 people.
Eyup is the latest to be pulled out of the rubble alive as rescuers desperately worked against the clock to find survivors.
Health Ministry official Seraceddin Com said about 40 people were pulled out alive from collapsed buildings yesterday.
They included a two-week-old baby girl brought out half-naked but alive from the wreckage of an apartment building 48 hours after the quake. Her mother and grandmother were also rescued, but her father was missing.
The pockets of jubilation were, however, tempered by many more discoveries of bodies by thousands of aid workers.
Desperate survivors fought over aid and blocked aid shipments. A powerful aftershock ignited widespread panic that triggered a prison riot in a nearby provincial city.
With thousands left homeless or too afraid to return to damaged houses, Turkey said it would accept international aid offers, even from Israel, with which it has had strained relations.
The country said it would need prefabricated homes to house survivors during the winter. Israel offered assistance despite a rift between the two countries over last year’s Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla that killed nine Turkish activists.
About 2,000 buildings collapsed and 1,350 people were injured. The fact that the quake hit in daytime, when many people were out of their homes, averted an even worse disaster.
Close to 500 aftershocks have rattled the area, according to Turkey’s Kandilli seismology centre.
A strong aftershock yesterday sent residents rushing into the streets in panic while sparking a riot that lasted several hours by prisoners in the city of Van, 85km south of Ercis. The US Geological Survey put the quake at a magnitude of 5.7.
Some prisoners demanded to be let out while others set bedding on fire as the revolt spread inside the 1,000-bed prison, the Dogan news agency reported.
Gerald Rockenshaub, disaster response manager at the World Health Organisation, said the first 48 to 72 hours are crucial for rescues and the chances of finding survivors decrease significantly after that. People can survive without food for a week or so, but having access to water is critical, especially for the elderly and infants, he said.
Turkey lies in one of the world's most active seismic zones and is crossed by numerous fault lines. In 1999, two earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7 struck north-western Turkey, killing about 18,000 people.
Istanbul, the country's largest city with more than 12 million people, lies in north-western Turkey near a major fault line, and experts say tens of thousands could be killed if a major quake struck there.