More quake survivors found
In Turkey, dozens of contractors detained
LATAKIA, Syria — Five days after two powerful earthquakes hours apart in Turkey and Syria caused thousands of buildings to collapse last week, killing more than 28,000 people and leaving millions homeless, rescuers were still pulling unlikely survivors from the ruins — one of them just 7 months old.
More than 100 people were detained, including dozens of contractors that Turkish authorities blamed for some of the building collapses in the earthquake, the staterun Anadolu News Agency reported Saturday.
The Turkish Justice Ministry ordered officials in those provinces to set up “Earthquake Crimes Investigation Units.” It also directed them to appoint prosecutors to bring criminal charges against all the “constructors and those responsible” for the collapse of buildings.
Among those detained Saturday was Mehmet Ertan Akay, builder of a collapsed complex in the hard-hit city of Gaziantep, who was charged with involuntary manslaughter and violation of public construction law, a Turkish news agency reported.
The Gaziantep prosecutor’s office said it had issued the detention order after inspecting evidence collected from the rubble of the complex he had built.
More than a dozen survivors were rescued Saturday, including a family in Kahramanmaras, the Turkish city closest to the epicenter of Monday’s quake. Crews there helped 12-year-old Nehir Naz Narli to safety before going back for her parents.
Although each rescue elicited hugs and shouts of “God is great!” — from the weary men and women working tirelessly in the freezing weather to save lives, they were the exception in a region blanketed by grief, desperation and mounting frustration.
In the Syrian town of Jableh, Ibrahim Zakaria lost track of time drifting into and out of consciousness while trapped for nearly five days in the rubble of his home following the earthquake. The 23-year-old cellphone shop worker survived on dirty drips of water and eventually lost hope that he’d be saved.
“I said I am dead and it will be impossible for me to live again,” Zakaria, who was rescued Friday night, told The Associated Press from his hospital bed Saturday in the coastal city of Latakia where his 60-year-old mother, Duha Nurallah, was also recovering.
In Gaziantep province, which borders Syria, a family of five was rescued from a demolished building in the city of Nurdagi, and a man and his 3-year-old daughter were pulled from debris in the town of Islahiye, television network HaberTurk reported. A 7-yearold girl was also rescued in Hatay province.
In Elbistan, a district in Kahramanmaras province, 20-year-old Melisa Ulku and another person were saved from the rubble 132 hours after the quake struck. Before she was brought to safety, police asked onlookers not to cheer or clap so as not to interfere with nearby rescue efforts.
Turkish TV station NTV reported that a 44-year-old man in Iskenderun, in Hatay province, was rescued 138 hours into his ordeal. Crying rescuers called it a miracle, with one saying they weren’t expecting to find anyone alive but as they were digging, they saw his eyes and he said his name.
In the same province, NTV also reported that a baby boy named Hamza was found alive in Antakya 140 hours after the quake. Some details of his rescue, including how he survived so long, weren’t immediately clear.
Not every attempt ended happily. Zeynep Kahraman, who was brought out of the rubble after a spectacular rescue that took 50 hours, died at a hospital overnight. The ISAR German team who rescued her were shocked and saddened.
“It is important that the family could say goodbye, that they could see each other one more time, that they could hug each other again,” a member of the rescue team told German TV news channel n-tv.
ERDOGAN ON DEFENSE
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting Diyarbakir province Saturday, defended the government’s response to the earthquake, which has been criticized as slow and haphazard. The earthquake has killed 24,617 people and injured at least 80,000 people in Turkey alone.
Erdogan acknowledged last week that the initial response was hampered by the extensive damage to roads and other infrastructure that made it difficult to reach some points.
He also said the worst-affected area was 310 miles in diameter and was home to 13.5 million people in Turkey. That has meant rescue crews have had to pick and choose how and where to help.
During a tour of quake-damaged cities Saturday, Erdogan said a disaster of this scope was rare and again referred to it as the “disaster of the century.” But the challenges facing aid efforts were of little comfort to those who have waited impatiently for government help to find their loved ones in the rubble, keep their families warm and ensure they get enough to eat.
In Antakya, the capital of Hatay province, scattered rescue crews were still hard at work but many residents had left by Saturday. Among those who stayed were people with family still buried. Many of them had been camping in the streets for days and sleeping in cars.
Acting on a tip, a rescue team from Hong Kong found three survivors under a building near the city’s center on Saturday, said Gallant Wong, the group’s spokesperson.
But Bulent Cifcifli, a local man, said he has been waiting for days for crews to pull his mother’s body from her collapsed home. He said rescuers were working to retrieve her body at one point, but they were called to another location because they suspected there were survivors.
“Six days later, we don’t know how many are still under the rubble, and how many are dead or alive,” Cifcifli said, blaming a lack of heavy equipment.
Yazi al-Ali, a Syrian refugee who came to Antakya from Reyhanli, has been living in a tent as she waits for crews to find her mother, two sisters, including one who was pregnant, and their families. At one point, she stood over the rubble of the home in Antakya’s old city center where she believes her pregnant sister was buried and, in a cracking voice, shouted her sister’s name, “Rajha!”
“No one is answering to us, and no one comes to look,” she said. “They have stopped us from looking ourselves. I don’t know why.”
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding additional survivors are quickly waning. Rescuers were shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign that any remaining survivors could be too weak to call for help.
INDIANS TREAT INJURED
As aid continued to arrive Saturday, a 99-member group from the Indian army’s medical assistance team began treating the injured in a temporary field hospital in the southern city of Iskenderun, where a main hospital was demolished.
One man, Sukru Canbulat, was wheeled into the hospital, his left leg badly injured with deep bruising, contusions and lacerations.
Wincing in pain, he said he was rescued from his collapsed apartment building in nearby Antakya within hours of the quake. But after receiving basic first aid, he was released without getting proper treatment.
“I buried [everyone that I lost], then I came here,” Canbulat said, counting his dead relatives. “My daughter is dead, my sibling died, my aunt and her daughter died, and the wife of her son” who was 8½ months pregnant.
A large makeshift graveyard was under construction Saturday in Antakya’s outskirts.
Backhoes and bulldozers dug pits in the field as trucks and ambulances loaded with black body bags arrived continuously. Soldiers directing traffic on the busy adjacent road warned motorists not to take photos.
The hundreds of graves, spaced no more than one yard apart, were marked with simple wooden planks set vertically in the ground.
A worker with Turkey’s Ministry of Religious Affairs who didn’t wish to be identified because of orders not to share information with the media said that around 800 bodies were brought to the cemetery Friday, its first day of operation. By midday Saturday, he said, as many as 2,000 had been buried.
The disaster compounded suffering in a region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war, which has displaced millions of people within the country and left them dependent on aid. The fighting sent millions more to seek refuge in Turkey.
The conflict has isolated many areas of Syria and complicated efforts to get aid in. The United Nations said the first earthquake-related aid convoy crossed from Turkey into northwestern Syria Friday, the day after an aid shipment planned before the disaster arrived. The U.N. refugee agency estimated that as many as 5.3 million people have been left homeless in Syria alone.
The death toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166, according to the rescue worker group the White Helmets. The overall death toll in Syria stood Saturday at 3,553, though the 1,387 deaths reported for government-held parts of the country hadn’t been updated in days.
Information for this article was contributed by Justin Spike, Abdelrahman Shaheen, Zeynep Bilginsoy, Bassem Mroue, Ghaith Alsayed, Sarah El Deeb and Suzan Fraser of The Associated Press and by Ben Hubbard, Hwaida Saad, Raja Abdulrahim, Safak Timur, Steven Erlanger and Gulsin Harman of The New York Times.