A 74-year-old woman was rescued alive on Wednesday after rescue teams pulled her from the rubble in Kahramanmaras province nine days after two earthquakes in Turkey.
The rescue of Cemile Kekec in Turkey came as local authorities, as well as international and Turkish rescue teams, admitted it was difficult to find living people under the rubble nine days after the tragedy.
Kekec was pulled out from under the rubble of the Kalkan apartment building in Kahramanmaras after a long struggle and was taken to hospital by ambulance 222 hours after the tremors.
As soon as this action became known to the international brigades present in Kahramanmaras, another rescue took place in Hatay province 228 hours after the earthquake.
A mother and her two children were rescued from the rubble of the Ugur apartment in the Hatay district of central Antakya.
Search and rescue teams working on the remains of Ugur’s completely destroyed home reached the woman and her two children and were later taken to a hospital by ambulance.
Hours earlier, another woman, now 42, identified as Fatma Gungor, was rescued from the ruins of a seven-story building in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, near the Syrian border.
Earlier, Seher, a 15-year-old Syrian girl, was rescued from the rubble in Hatay. This is exactly where a team of Sevillian firefighters, with the help of dogs, located another woman 200 hours after the earthquake.
The rescue of people this Wednesday is marked by the difficulties of surviving for so long in extreme conditions without food and water as this Thursday marks the nine days of earthquakes.
In Turkey at least, the death toll has risen to 35,410 as the country prepares for the recovery and reconstruction phase, when local estimates suggested 400,000 new buildings would be needed in quake-hit areas.
In Syria, the latest figures indicate at least 3,384 deaths, 1,347 of them in government-controlled areas and the rest under the control of radical groups that receive support and arms supplies from US occupying forces.
However, the UN put the death toll at 5,814.