Rescuers in the Turkish coastal city of Izmir pulled a young girl out alive from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building on Tuesday, four days after a strong earthquake hit Turkey and Greece.
The girl was seen being taken into an ambulance, wrapped in a thermal blanket, amid the sounds of applause and chants of “God is great!” from rescue workers and onlookers.
Media reports identified her as 4-year-old Ayla Gezgin. She had been trapped inside the rubble for 91 hours since Friday’s quake struck in the Aegean Sea.
Rescuer Nusret Aksoy told reporters that he heard a child scream before locating the girl next to a dishwasher. He said Ayla waved at him, told him her name and said that she was okay.
Her rescue came a day after a 3-year-old girl and a 14-year-old girl were also pulled out alive from collapsed buildings in Izmir.
Meanwhile, death toll in the earthquake reached 102, after emergency crews retrieved more bodies elsewhere in Turkey’s third-largest city.
The U.S. Geological Survey rated the quake at 7.0 magnitude, although other agencies in Turkey recorded it as less severe.
The vast majority of the deaths and nearly 1,000 injuries occurred in Izmir. Two teenagers also died and 19 people were injured on the Greek island of Samos, near the quake’s epicenter in the Aegean Sea.
Officials said 147 quake survivors were still hospitalized, and three of them were in serious condition.
© 2020 The Canadian Press
