Turkey-Syria earthquake: 17-year-old girl rescued as hunt for bodies continues

Bodies continued to be retrieved from rubble across southern Turkey on Thursday as the death toll from the earthquake neared 42,000 and anger mounted among survivors, who said lax building standards were as much to blame as the tremor itself.

A lone survivor, a 17-year-old girl, was pulled from ruins in the nearly destroyed city of Antakya, in a moment of relief for rescuers. But the almost miraculous rescue was dwarfed by an ongoing recovery operation that shows little sign of slowing down.

Rescue teams continue to work frantically across vast tracts of urban ruins, with diggers picking gently at heaped piles of rubble until a body is located. Weary rescuers then switch to cutting tools and spades, attempting to pry victims from the indistinguishable remains of their homes and placing them in body bags.

The familiar pattern has shown little signs of slowing in the south-eastern city of Adiyaman, where local people say the death toll far exceeds official figures.

Similar refrains come from across southern Turkey as residents try to salvage what remains of their families and belongings. But their grief is being subsumed by anger over the scale of destruction in some areas, compared with nearby communities that have remained largely unscathed.

Developers who constructed buildings that failed to meet safety standards have borne the brunt of anger. But permissive regulatory environments that facilitated the rapid construction of lower-quality structures are in the sights of survivors, who are calling on Ankara to explain how such homes were allowed to be built.

Meanwhile, the UN has announced an appeal for $1bn in relief funds for victims in southern Turkey, where, as well as almost 37,000 deaths, up to a million people have been displaced by what the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said was the biggest ever natural disaster on Nato soil.

A separate appeal for almost $400m has been launched for neighbouring Syria, where close to 6,000 people died in the government-held areas of Aleppo and the north-west of the country, which bore the brunt of damage.

Another 1 million Syrian residents of Turkey are believed to have been affected by the disaster, with many having fallen between the cracks of Turkey, which is caring for its citizens, and the UN, which has been roundly criticised for its slow response.

Up to 2,300 bodies have been returned to Syria from southern Turkey, while 2,800 Syrian citizens have voluntarily gone back through the Bab al-Hawa crossing.

Up to 120 aid trucks had crossed into Syria as of Thursday. However, local officials say aid needs dwarf the amount of relief being received, with large numbers of people having no shelter or protection against the winter.