Rescuers pulled a two-week-old baby girl alive from the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block today as they battled to find survivors from a earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed at least 432 people and left thousands homeless.
An aftershock with a magnitude of 5.4 shook Turkey's southeast province of Van today, the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute said. It said the epicentre of the aftershock was Degirmenozu, between Van city and the badly hit town of Ercis.
The baby's mother and a grandmother were also brought out alive on stretchers to jubilant cries from onlookers who followed the dramatic rescue under cold, pouring rain.
"It's a miracle!", said Senol Yigit, the uncle of the baby, Azra, whose name means "purity" or "untouched" in Arabic. "I'm so happy. What can I say. We have been waiting for two days. We had lost hope when we first saw the building," he said sobbing.
However, hope of finding more people alive under tonnes of rubble faded with every passing hour as rescuers pulled out more bodies.
The death toll from the 7.2-magnitude quake rose to 432, from an earlier 366, the Disaster and Emergency Administration said. The final count was likely to rise further as many people were still missing and 2,262 buildings had collapsed.
Thousands slept for a second night in crowded tents or huddled around fires and in cars across a region rattled by aftershocks in Van province, near the Iranian border.
The centre of Van, a city of one million, resembled a ghost town, and in the hard-hit town of Ercis thousands of people roamed the streets.
With victims accusing the central government of being slow in delivering aid to a region inhabited mostly by minority Kurds, Ankara said it was sending more tents and blankets. In some distribution centres, fighting broke out among desperate victims to grab tents from overwhelmed aid workers.
The prime minister's Disaster and Emergency Administration said priority should be given to delivering tents, blankets, sleeping bags, water and food to the victims. Electricity cuts have hampered rescue efforts, and there are worries about the weather with winter snows less than a month away.
"We have no tents, everybody is living outdoors. Van has collapsed psychologically, life has stopped. Tens of thousands are on the streets. Everybody is in panic," Kemal Balci, a construction worker, said.
"Aid has been arriving late. Van has been reduced to zero. We have no jobs, no bread, no water and there are nine members in my family. If the government doesn't give a hand to Van it will be like Afghanistan. Van has been pushed back 100 years."
The quake, Turkey's most powerful in a decade, is one more affliction for Kurds, the dominant ethnic group in impoverished southeast Turkey, where more than 40,000 people have been killed in a three-decade-long separatist insurgency.
In an escalation of hostilities, Turkish warplanes struck targets overnight in northern Iraq, where the separatist militants have bases.
Some 500 soldiers have crossed the border with armoured vehicles in the wake of an attack last week by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters that killed 24 Turkish troops, security sources said.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who won a third consecutive term with a strong majority at a June election, has pledged to push reforms in parliament and rewrite the constitution to address long-time Kurdish grievances in an effort to end violence. Mr Erdogan travelled to the region on Sunday, and President Abdullah Gul has also announced plans to visit.
Reuters