Three-year-old rescued from rubble, Turkey quake death toll hits 81

[November 02, 2020]    ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A three-year-old girl was rescued from a collapsed building in the western Turkish city of Izmir on Monday, officials said, nearly three days after a powerful earthquake in the Aegean Sea region which has killed 81 people.

Rescue operations take place on a site after an earthquake struck the Aegean Sea, in the coastal province of Izmir, Turkey, November 2, 2020. REUTERS/Kemal Aslan

Rescue efforts were continuing in eight buildings in Izmir where 79 people were killed, making Friday's earthquake the deadliest in Turkey for nearly a decade. Two teenagers died on the Greek island of Samos, authorities said.

Television footage showed the girl, Elif, being pulled from the rubble and carried by rescue workers on a stretcher to an ambulance, 65 hours after the earthquake struck.

Elif's two sisters and brother were rescued along with their mother on Saturday, but one of the children subsequently died.

"A thousand thanks to you, my God. We have brought out our little one Elif from the apartment block," Mehmet Gulluoglu, head of Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), wrote on Twitter.

More than 3,500 tents and 13,000 beds have been supplied to provide temporary shelter, according to AFAD, which said 962 people had been injured in Friday's earthquake.

More than 740 victims have so far been discharged from hospitals, AFAD said.

It was the deadliest earthquake in Turkey since one in the eastern city of Van in 2011 which killed more than 500 people. A quake in January this year killed 41 people in the eastern province of Elazig.

Turkey is crossed by fault lines and is prone to earthquakes. In 1999, two powerful quakes killed 18,000 people in northwestern Turkey.

The Friday earthquake, which the Istanbul-based Kandilli Institute said had a magnitude of 6.9, was centred in the Aegean Sea, northeast of Samos.

(Writing by Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Catherine Evans)

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