At least 84 people were confirmed dead and 390 injured on Thursday when a strong earthquake rocked south-eastern Turkey.
Rescuers dug frantically to rescue more than 100 children believed to be trapped under debris after their school collapsed.
Turkish Industry Minister Ali Coskun said at least 84 people had been killed, while Housing Minister Zeki Ergezen said the estimated death toll was 150. Television channel NTV reported that 105 bodies had already reached the city’s morgue. The report could not be independently confirmed.
Emergency crews were working to rescue 118 primary and middle school pupils buried under the rubble of their four-storey dormitory that collapsed in the south-eastern city of Bingol.
Five pupils had been found dead in the rubble, according to Bingol’s mayor, Feyzullah Karaalsan. NTV said at least 69 children had been rescued.
The earthquake, which measured 6,4 on the Richter scale, struck the region at about 3.27am local time on Thursday and was centred just outside Bingol, the Kandilli Seismology Centre in Istanbul said.
Karaaslan said the toll was expected to rise.
”As the hours go by, the news from Bingol gets more sad. We estimate the death toll to be around 150, there are about 300 injured,” he said, adding that soldiers were on their way from the capital, Ankara, to help with the rescue operations.
Civil defence and mountaineers with earthquake-rescue experience were also on their way to Bingol, which is about 688km east of Ankara.
At least 25 buildings and a bridge collapsed in the centre of Bingol, a city of 250 000 inhabitants, the mayor said. Rescue officials were still unable to reach many villages in the area.
Soldiers, rescue workers and ordinary citizens worked their way through the debris to try to rescue students still believed to be alive from the school’s dormitory. The Anatolia news agency said voices of the trapped children could be heard from under the debris, while soldiers tried to prevent hundreds of desperate relatives from approaching the collapsed building.
Mustafa Gunala (11) said he was saved by the school’s caretaker, who guided him and a group of students out of the rubble.
”I didn’t understand what happened. I saw the ceiling coming toward me,” he told Anatolia.
Meanwhile, parents questioned the quality of the school’s construction.
”The stable I built did not collapse, but the school did,” Mustafa’s father, Abdullah Gunala said.
”May God save us from the worst,” Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said in a news conference in Ankara. ”My hope is that the we end the rescue efforts in a happy way and we don’t come across a sad outcome regarding our young ones.”
The earthquake damaged power and telephone lines in the area and cut off electricity.
Doctors at Bingol’s state hospital and town officials appealed for help to deal with the crisis. ”We need every kind of help,” said Ilhan Cokabay, chief doctor at the hospital. ”Medical supplies, people, whatever.”
”Many buildings collapsed and we have a large number of people in
the streets with no place to stay,” Karaaslan said.
The tremor was also felt in the nearby provinces of Erzincan, Tunceli, Erzurum, Kayseri and Sivas.
More than 50 aftershocks struck the area, including one with a magnitude of five on the Richter scale.
Gulay Barbarasoglu, head of the Istanbul observatory, said the quake lasted for 17 seconds. Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, which lies on the active North Anatolian fault. A 1971 quake in Bingol killed 900 people.
Ruptures in the fault caused two quakes in August 1999 that killed 18 000 people and devastated large parts of north-western Turkey. — Â