Turkey earthquake: Seven-month-old baby rescued after 139 hours under rubble

A seven-month-old baby has been rescued after spending 139 hours trapped under rubble in Turkey.

Thousands of buildings collapsed after powerful earthquakes hit Turkey on Monday.

It is estimated that around 28,000 people have died but UN relief chief Martin Griffiths has warned that it could be double this number.

Syria has not reported its death toll since Friday and Griffiths warned that insufficient aid was reaching the wartorn country.

“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Griffiths said on Twitter.

“My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.”

Despite freezing and dangerous conditions rescuers were still finding people alive on Sunday.

A young baby was pulled out of rubble in Hatay Turkey after 139 hours while a 12-year-old girl, Cudie, was saved after being trapped for 147 hours.

State media also reported a 13-year-old saved in Gaziantep on Sunday, with rescuers saying: “You are a miracle.”

British firefighters filmed the dramatic moment they pulled a police officer and a woman from the rubble of a building in Turkey – five days after the country was devastated by an earthquake.

The footage shows search and rescue specialists in Hatay, southern Turkey, rescuing the man and woman who had been trapped under a collapsed multi-storey building for 120 hours.

Phil Irving, 46, from Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, was part of the team to take part in the painstaking extraction, which ended on Saturday with the pair being brought out alive.

The dad-of-two said the battle to save them, and their determination to stay alive, “will stay with me”.

“These people were entombed in rubble and debris and we had to work around the clock to bring them out alive,” he said.

“It was Friday afternoon when we first discovered signs of life. We knew 100 per cent that they were alive.

“We were hearing them tapping and shouting so we knew we were close to them but reaching them was a major challenge.

“It was a catastrophic collapse and access was difficult.

“They were trapped in there for over five days and it will stay with me their incredible capacity to keep going, hope and believe.”

He added that a successful rescue can be a “bitter-sweet moment”.

“I always find that it is a mixed emotion when we get someone out because if you rescue one person and they are reunited with a relative, generally speaking that person has left a loved one in the building, who has not been so lucky.

“It is generally a bitter-sweet moment.”

Arrest warrants have been issued for the detention of 131 people suspected of being responsible for collapsed buildings.

Even though Turkey has, on paper, construction codes that meet current earthquake-engineering standards, they are too rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings slumped onto their side or pancaked downward onto residents.

Turkey’s justice minister has vowed to punish anyone responsible, and prosecutors have begun gathering samples of buildings for evidence on materials used in constructions.

Authorities at Istanbul Airport on Sunday detained two contractors held responsible for the destruction of several buildings in Adiyaman.

The pair were reportedly on their way to Georgia.

One of the arrested contractors, Yavuz Karakus said: “My conscience is clear. I built 44 buildings. Four of them were demolished. I did everything according to the rules.”

Two more people were arrested in the province of Gaziantep suspected of having cut down columns to make extra room in a building that collapsed.

A day earlier, Turkey’s Justice Ministry announced the planned establishment of “Earthquake Crimes Investigation” bureaus.

The bureaus would aim to identify contractors and others responsible for building works, gather evidence, instruct experts including architects, geologists and engineers, and check building permits and occupation permits.

A building contractor was detained by authorities on Friday at Istanbul airport before he could board a flight out of the country.

He was the contractor of a luxury 12-story building in the historic city of Antakya, in Hatay province, the collapse of which left an untold number of dead.