TURKEY: COUPLE SAVED 296 HOURS AFTER MASSIVE TEMBLORS

Death toll tops 44,000 as rescue efforts set to end

A couple and their son were pulled alive from under a collapsed apartment building more than 12 days after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ravaged parts of Turkey and Syria, although the child later died at a hospital, Turkish state media reported Saturday.

A foreign search team from Kyrgyzstan rescued Samir Muhammed Accar, 49, his wife, Ragda, 40, and their 12-year-old son while digging through the rubble of the apartment building in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.

They were removed at about 11:30 a.m. local time, or 296 hours after the Feb. 6 quake, and quickly transferred to ambulances. TV footage showed medics fixing an IV drip to the man’s arm as he lay on a stretcher.

One of the Kyrgyz rescuers said the team also found the bodies of two children. Anadolu later reported they also were the children of Samir Muhammad and Ragda Accar.

During a visit to Antakya, the capital of Hatay province, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the father was conscious and being treated at Mustafa Kemal University Hospital. Anadolu published photos showing American TV personality and former U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz visiting the recovering man.

Reporting on their conversation, Anadolu said Samir Muhammed Accar described how he survived the ordeal by drinking his own urine. He also told Oz that his children responded to his voice for the first two or three days but he heard nothing from them after that.

Hatay province, where Antakya is located, was one of areas hit hardest by the earthquake, which killed at least 40,642 people in Turkey and 3,688 in Syria.

Search and rescue operations are continuing in Turkey, although the head of the country’s disaster response agency said they would end today.

Syria: Israeli strikes kill 5 in Damascus

Israeli airstrikes targeted a residential neighborhood in central Damascus early today, Syrian state news reported.

Explosions were heard over the capital around 12:30 a.m., and SANA reported that Syrian air defenses were “confronting hostile targets in the sky around Damascus.”

Syrian state media agency SANA, citing a military source, reported that five people had been killed, among them a soldier, and 15 civilians wounded, along with “destruction of a number of residential buildings.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.k.-based war monitor, reported that 15 people, including a woman, were killed in strikes targeting sites connected with Iranian militias and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the Damascus countryside and on an Iranian school in the neighborhood of Kafr Sousa in the capital.

There was no immediate statement from Israel on the attack.

Death toll from ISIS attack rises to 53

The death toll from an attack by the Islamic State group against an army checkpoint and people collecting truffles in central Syria has risen to at least 53, most of them civilians, state media and an opposition war monitor reported Saturday.

The attack near the central town of Sukhna on Friday was the deadliest by the extremist group so far this year, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor said.

The Observatory, which tracks Syria’s conflict, said the Islamic State gunmen took advantage of the aftermath of the deadly Feb. 6 earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria to carry out their deadly attack. The attention in Syria has been mostly focused on the earthquake over the past two weeks.

Seven detained over deaths of 18 in truck

Authorities in Bulgaria have detained seven people in connection with an abandoned truck in which 18 people believed to be migrants were found dead, police said Saturday.

The bodies were discovered Friday in a secret compartment below a load of lumber in the truck, which was left on a highway.

Borislav Sarafov, director of Bulgaria’s National Investigation Service, confirmed that all the victims had died of suffocation. He called the case the country’s deadliest involving smuggled migrants.

All the passengers were from Afghanistan and had entered Bulgaria from Turkey while hoping to reach Western Europe, authorities said.