Turkey has once again been hit with an earthquake killing at least three people, with rescue teams searching for people under the rubble.
A 6.4 magnitude tremor hit near the city of Antakya, close to the Syrian border, where massive quakes devastated both countries on 6 February.
Weakened by the quakes, buildings fell in both countries, Turkey and Syria, on Monday. The 6.4 magnitude quake struck at 20:04 local time (18:04 MUT), while the 5.8 aftershock followed three minutes later, said Turkey’s disaster and emergency agency.
Interior Minister of Turkey, Suleyman Soylu, stated that three deaths have been reported in Antakya, Defne and Samandag, and has requested people not to enter the buildings that might collapse.
Earlier, 44,000 people were killed in Turkey and Syria, while thousands of people were left homeless.
In the city of Antakya, fear and panic in the streets were reported, where ambulances and rescue teams searched in the worst affected areas and where walls of disrupted buildings collapsed.
Muna al-Omar, a resident, told the British news agency Reuters, “I thought the earth was going to split open under my feet”, while she was crying and holding her seven-year-old son. She was in a tent set up in a park in the central city when the recent earthquake occurred.
An 18-year-old, Ali Mazlum, told Agency France Presse (AFP), a global news agency, that when the new quake struck, he was searching for the bodies of his family members from the previous tremors.
He said, “You don’t know what to do… we grabbed each other and right in front of us, the walls started to fall.”
After Monday’s earthquake, around 470 injured people were reported to be in hospitals in Syria. The tremors were also felt in Egypt and Lebanon.
Dr Fahrettin Koca, Turkey’s health minister, reported 294 injuries, 18 of them serious.
Since the earthquake occurred in a region that was largely deserted after being severely damaged by the quake on February 6, it is believed that the death toll was comparatively low this time.
People in the Turkish city of Adana were compelled by the most recent earthquake to go to a volleyball court that had been transformed into a rescue facility after the previous one.
Many were said to have fled their homes when the earthquake hit, demonstrating that there is still a great deal of anxiety two weeks after the initial calamity.
