Earthquake in Turkey: the city of Kahramanmaras counts its dead

Head in the rubble Kahramanmaras (Turkey), rescuers try to hear a sign of life, Thursday, February 9. Around, relatives freeze in silence and hope. Eventually, there will be no noise, no survivors. It’s chaos, bodies are taken out of the rubble almost every minute. A woman mourns her nephew. “My son, it’s me who should have died in your place“, she says. A father insisted on carrying his child’s body to the ambulance himself. Other relatives leave with boxes of souvenirs found in the debris.

Construction machinery is activated

A woman was saved thanks to her parents whom she managed to call, the phone having remained in her pocket. “The ceiling started to flatten over my head. There was just a plastic chair that prevented him from crushing us (…). I thank my father, my mother, my brothers, if they hadn’t come, I would never have made it“, she says. “The construction machines are more and more active, when they believe that there is no longer any trace of life, they destroy the buildings”, reports journalist Alexandra Lay, from Kahramanmaras.