Boy, 13, is pulled from earthquake rubble after five days

A 13-YEAR-OLD boy was pulled from a collapsed building uninjured yesterday, five days after Turkey’s powerful earthquake struck, and state-run TV said he survived by drinking rainwater that seeped through cracks in the wreckage around him.

Ferhat Tokay also used shoes under his head as a pillow and peered through a tiny gap in the wreckage to see when it was day or night outside, his uncle said.

Tokay was discovered early yesterday morning, soon after rescue workers from Azerbaijan had sent the uncle and other relatives away from the site to get some rest, saying there was no chance of finding the missing boy alive.

“He didn’t even have a scratch on him” the uncle, Sahin Tokay, said. “He was hungry on the first day, but the hunger pangs later disappeared.”

The 7.2 magnitude quake levelled about 2,000 buildings in eastern Turkey on Sunday, killing at least 575 people and leaving about 2,500 injured and thousands of homeless.

Authorities say another 5,700 buildings are now unfit for habitation.

The government’s crisis management centre said 187 people have been freed from the rubble alive.

Interior minister Idris Naim Sahin said search and rescue efforts were continuing “in small sections” of Ercis, the hardest-hit area. “Hopefully we will be successful in pulling out survivors there, too,” he told reporters.

Ferhat Tokay was working in a shoe shop on the ground floor of a multi-storey building in the town when the quake hit.

Turkey is mostly Muslim, and in Ercis yesterday many held traditional Muslim prayers outdoors, in parks or in streets strewn with rubble.