Rescuers pulled survivors from beneath mounds of collapsed buildings and searched for the missing on Monday after a major earthquake killed at least 264 people and wounded more than 1,000 in mainly Kurdish south-east Turkey. Hundreds more were feared dead after Sunday's 7.2 magnitude quake, Turkey's most powerful in a decade, toppled remote villages of mud brick houses.
As desperate survivors cried for help beneath mounds of smashed concrete and twisted metal, some using mobile phones, earth-moving machines and troops joined rescue efforts in the city of Van and the town of Ercis, some 100 km (60 miles) to the north. "Be patient, be patient," rescuers in Ercis told a whimpering boy pinned under a concrete slab with the lifeless hand of an adult, a wedding ring on one finger, visible just in front of his face.
A Reuters photographer saw a woman and her daughter being freed from beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a six-storey building. "I'm here, I'm here," the woman, named Fidan, called out in a hoarse voice. Talking to her regularly while working for more than two hours to find a way through, rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting the daughter's foot, before freeing them.
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