Turkish state media reported that a husband, wife and son were pulled alive from under a collapsed apartment building more than 12 days following a 7.8-magnitude earthquake devastated parts of Turkey and Syria, although the child later died in a hospital.
Samir Mehmet Akar, 49, his wife Raghda, 40, and their 12-year-old son were rescued by a foreign research team from Kyrgyzstan while digging through the rubble of a residential building in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
They were pulled out at around 11:30 a.m. local time (8:30 GMT), or 296 hours following the February 6 earthquake, and rushed to ambulances. Television footage showed medics placing an intravenous solution into the man’s arm as he lay on a stretcher.
A rescuer said the team also found the bodies of two children. Anadolu Agency later reported that they were the sons of Samir and Raghda.
Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said during a visit to Antakya, the capital of Hatay state, that the father was conscious and receiving treatment at Mustafa Kemal University Hospital. And the Anadolu Agency published pictures showing the American TV personality and former candidate for the US Senate, Mehmet Oz, visiting the recovering man.
And regarding the conversation that took place between them, Anatolia reported that Samir Muhammad Akar told how he survived the ordeal by drinking his urine. He also told Oz that his children were responding to his voice for the first two or three days, but he didn’t hear anything following that.
Hatay province, where Antakya is located, was one of the areas hardest hit by the earthquake, which killed at least 40,642 people in Turkey and 3,688 in Syria.
Search and rescue operations are continuing in Turkey, although the head of the country’s disaster response agency said it would end Sunday.
