12 dead in eastern Turkey's second lethal earthquake

Rescue workers said there was little hope of finding any more survivors of eastern Turkey's latest, 5.6-magnitude earthquake, and excavating machines were clearing the debris early Friday, dpa reported.

With cranes and hydraulic cutters, workers managed to retrieve 12 bodies while pulling 29 survivors out of the rubble within 24 hours of Wednesday night's temblor. Authorities contradicted earlier reports that up to 150 people could still be buried under the rubble.

A rescuer at the Aslan hotel said late Thursday that he and colleagues were looking for only four people under the compacted concrete and smashed furniture, and they were dead.

At the bigger Bayram Hotel, men in orange uniforms said there were no more than 16 people buried underneath.

One of the site's team leaders, Necmettin Kocaman, said it was "very difficult" for anybody trapped below to still be alive. He pointed to the three excavators digging into the rubble under floodlights: "The machines shouldn't work if there are people alive."

An angry young man had made the same point to Turkish Interior Minister Beshir Atalay and Health Minister Recep Akdag late Thursday when they visited the Bayram, a six-storey hotel reduced to a two-story pile of rubble.

A plain-clothed police officer tried to remove the heckler, who tussled with the officer and shouted: "There are people alive under the buildings. I just wanted to say this to the ministers."

Tempers frayed Thursday in Van, as residents voiced their dissatisfaction with the government's response to both Wednesday's quake and the 7.2-magnitude quake that rocked Van province on October 23, killing more than 600 people.

When Atalay visited the Bayram site in the afternoon, a crowd of about 100 locals confronted him. Some hecklers pointed out that after the first quake, Van Governor Munir Karaloglu, a central government appointee, had urged residents to return to their apartment buildings if they hadn't collapsed.

The minister turned his back on the protesters, while police baton-charged the group and fired teargas, which drifted into the eyes of rescue workers, who had to stop working.

Elsewhere in the city, a small crowd of citizens threw stones at police guarding a disaster relief depot, demanding that they be given tents. Police dispersed the crowd with batons and made some arrests.

The collapse of the two hotels - buildings that had been deemed safe for occupation - had widespread repercussions in Van, a city of 500,000 people. Thousands of people fled the city, packing the central bus station and airport on Thursday.

Parts of central Van resembled a ghost town: shops closed, few parked cars and no sign of life in flats.

The government shared the lack of confidence in the city's buildings, ordering the closure of all schools until December 5 and airlifting 15,000 tents to Van.

Two of the people pulled alive from the Bayram hotel were Japanese relief workers who had come to help Turkey recover from the October 23 quake.

Miyuki Konnai and Atsushi Miyazaki had been working for the Association for Aid and Relief in the villages around Van - the mud-brick settlements that were devastated by the 7.2-magnitude quake.

Rescuers pulled out Konnai after five and half hours under the rubble. CNN Turk quoted her as saying: "When I was under the rubble, the light from my computer gave me hope." She was suffered minor injuries and was soon released from hospital.

It took rescue workers 13 hours to recover Miyazaki, though he had been only five rooms down the corridor from Konnai. When rescuers pulled him out, his heart stopped, and resuscitation efforts began on top of the rubble. He was rushed to a local hospital - where Miyazaki was treated in tent, as the building had been damaged by the quake - and was later declared dead.

The quake's epicentre was in Edremit, 20 kilometres south-west of Van's city centre. None of its buildings collapsed, apparently because the town is built on rock.


/Trend/