A teenage girl has been rescued 248 hours after last week’s devastating earthquake in Turkey.
Aleyna Olmez, 17, was pulled from the rubble in Kahramanmaras, a southern city near the epicenter.
Her uncle, with tears in his eyes, told the rescuers “we will never forget you” as he hugged them one by one.
Aleyna survived 10 days, injured in the cold. But rescues like her are becoming rarer and rarer.
In Turkey and neighboring Syria, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 killed more than 41,000 people. Neither country has disclosed how many people are still missing.
As reported by the Turkish television company TRT Haber, Aleyna was carefully pulled out of the ruins of the destroyed apartment building.
“She seemed to be healthy. She opened and closed her eyes,” Ali Akdogan, a miner who participated in the rescue, told AFP.
“We have been working here in this building for a week now… we are happy when we find a living thing – even a cat,” he added.
But the celebrations did not last long. Shortly after the rescue, Turkish soldiers ordered people to leave the scene as crews found corpses that would soon be removed.
Three women and two children were found alive in the same city on Wednesday.
