2 children pulled alive in dramatic Turkey quake rescues
Source: AP
By MEHMET GUZEL and SUZAN FRASER
IZMIR, Turkey (AP) — When firefighter Muammer Celik reached a 3-year-old girl trapped for three days under the rubble of a deadly earthquake in a Turkish coastal city, his heart sank. She was lying motionless, covered in dust, and he asked a colleague for a body bag.
But as Celik extended his arm to wipe her face, the child opened her eyes and grabbed hold of his thumb.
“That’s where we saw a miracle,” Celik of the Istanbul fire department’s search-and-rescue team told The Associated Press, recounting Monday’s operation 65 hours after the quake hit, killing at least 93 people in Turkey and Greece.
It was the second dramatic rescue Monday after a 14-year-old was also pulled out alive. Onlookers applauded with joy and wept with relief at both scenes in the Turkish city of Izmir, where the vast majority of the deaths and nearly 1,000 injuries have occurred. Two teenagers also died and 19 people were injured on the Greek island of Samos, near the quake’s epicenter in the Aegean Sea.
In this handout photo made available by the Istanbul Fire Authority, members of various rescue services carry 3-year-old girl Elif Perincek, after she was rescued from the rubble of a building some 65 hours after a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in Izmir, Turkey, Monday, Nov. 2, 2020. Rescue teams continue ploughing through concrete blocs and debris of collapsed buildings in Turkey's third largest city in search of survivors of a powerful earthquake that struck Turkey's Aegean coast and north of the Greek island of Samos, Friday Oct. 30, killing dozens. Close to a thousand people were injured.(Istanbul Fire Authority via AP)
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/turkey-aegean-sea-europe-earthquakes-greece-a52e6060abeebf82edca49e960790428
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