Rescuers pulled a two-week-old baby girl alive from the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block on Tuesday as they battled to find survivors from a earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed at least 366 people and left thousands homeless.
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.
“MIRACLE” BABY
Emergency workers extracted the infant girl alive from the wreckage two days after she was buried with her mother under an apartment block.
The mother was clutching the child to her chest when they were reached by rescuers, who then set about rescuing the mother and a grandmother who were also still alive.
“We’re going to get them out soon,” a rescuer assured the other grandmother, whose eyes brimmed with tears of joy at the survival of her grandchild.
Elsewhere, exhausted workers used machinery, jackhammers, shovels, pick axes and bare hands to comb through rubble. Every so often, they would shout for silence and generators and diggers would stop, straining to hear voices under the wreckage. Seconds later the drone of the machinery would start again.
