Joy as infant plucked from Turkey quake rubble

ERCIS: Rescuers plucked a two-week-old baby girl from the rubble Tuesday 48 hours after a devastating earthquake killed at least 366 people in Turkey, energising the desperate search effort.

As the body bags piled up and the Red Crescent warned that hundreds or even thousands of people remained buried under the debris, the rescue of the infant named Azra sparked joy amid the otherwise grim task.

The rescue workers reached the baby after hours of frantic digging around her home in the worst-hit town of Ercis and were working to free the mother whose name was given as Semiha. The father was missing, rescuers said.

Emergency teams had earlier pulled a pregnant woman and her two children alive from the rubble in Ercis as they laboured through the night under search lights with the help of sniffer dogs.

"Hundreds, possibly thousands of people are still trapped under the rubble," said Jessica Sallabank, a spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

The IFRC said that 2,256 buildings -- mostly apartments -- were destroyed during the quake which struck on Sunday afternoon, its epicentre focused on the eastern province of Van.

An update from the prime minister's office put the death toll at 366, adding that more than 1,300 people had been injured.

The population of the region is mainly Kurdish and the quake came amid a major army operation targeting the separatist PKK militia in response to a series of deadly attacks.

In a sign of the simmering ethnic tensions, dozens of residents of the provincial capital Van hurled stones at journalists and police on Tuesday after a well-known television presenter criticisised Kurds' appeals for help.

Police used pepper gas to disperse the angry crowd but there were complaints among survivors in other areas that soldiers whose barracks had been damaged were being given priority in the aid effort.

Residents meanwhile spent a second night outside in freezing temperatures.

"I am still trembling.... As long as those aftershocks go on, we will stay in the street," Gulizar, a Kurdish woman in her 40s, told AFP as she tried to keep warm in front of a makeshift fire in Van city centre.

With night-time temperatures expected to dip to two degrees Celsius (36 fahrenheit) and snow forecast for Wednesday, residents took shelter anywhere they could -- some in cars, tents and others under just a blanket.

"Our house was badly damaged. We will live like this maybe for one or two weeks," said 34-year-old Zuleyha, who was staying in her car with her husband and five-year-old son.

Another resident, named only as Nebahat, said: "We have no heater, we received no blankets, not even pain killers."

"We have been freezing all night, we only had three blankets which I managed to take from my home."

The football pitch in Ercis has been transformed into a sea of tents set up by the Red Crescent as the stadium serves as a make-shift field hospital. About 1,500 units of blood have been sent to the region.

The government said search and rescue teams from 45 cities and more than 200 ambulances were deployed across the disaster-struck area.

Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said 10 countries had offered to send emergency teams but the government had declined the offers for now. Though Iran, which felt the tremor as well in its northwestern cities, has sent rescuers and equipment.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has said his country "stands ready" to help and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, with whom relations have become frosty over the past year, telephoned Erdogan to tell him that Israel "is ready to help Turkey in this painful time," Anatolia reported.

The Turkish Red Crescent has sent some 7,500 tents, more than 22,000 blankets, almost 4,000 heaters and 1,000 body bags to the region. A mobile bakery and 21 mobile kitchens were also sent to Van.

In 1999, two strong quakes in northwest Turkey's heavily populated and industrialised regions left some 20,000 dead. A powerful earthquake in the town of Caldiran in Van province killed 3,840 people in 1976.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011