Turkey earthquake

Rescue teams are digging frantically through dozens of collapsed buildings in eastern Turkey after a strong earthquake caused severe damage and left more than 200 people confirmed dead – a toll expected to rise substantially.

The 7.2-magnitude earthquake on Sunday morning particularly hit Ercis and Van, cities in a mountainous region near Turkey's border with Iran. There are expected to be significant casualties in surrounding villages where, according to the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, almost all mud-brick homes had collapsed.

The interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, who has been placed in charge of rescue operations, said the quake was known to have killed at least 120 people in Ercis, a community of about 75,000 people, and about 100 more in the much bigger city of Van, about 60 miles further south. More than 700 people were known to have been injured.

Rescue teams, aided by soldiers, spent the night in near-freezing temperatures digging through the remains of dozens of collapsed multi-storey buildings. At least 80 fell in Ercis, fuelling suspicions that, as with previous Turkish quakes, shoddy construction standards could greatly add to the death toll. About 40 buildings in Ercis still had people trapped beneath rubble, Sahin said.

At one of these, firefighters from the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir tried to reach four children believed trapped deep inside the remains of an apartment block. At another site, onlookers watched as rescuers tried to calm a 10-year-old boy whom they were attempting to free from beneath a concrete slab.

While some of the work was being carried out with cranes, many rescue efforts involved shovels, picks or bare hands. There were, however, some moments of success. Turkey's Dogan news agency reported that 24 people were pulled alive from rubble in just the two hours after midnight.

Aside from the rescue efforts there is a pressing need to provide shelter to thousands of survivors, many of whom will not be able to return to their damaged homes, particularly as dozens of aftershocks continue to shake the region.

Many people spent the night outdoors around campfires, or sought shelter with relatives. The Red Crescent has begun distributing an initial allocation of 4,000 tents, 11,000 blankets, stoves and food. A temporary tent city was being set up inside a sports stadium in Ercis.

One nurse in Ercis told the CNN Turk TV news channel that the town's hospital was so badly damaged staff were treating injured in the garden, and bodies were being left outside the building.

A number of countries have offered assistance with both relief aid and search and rescue efforts. Erdoğan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being.

Erdoğan travelled to the region on Sunday, firstly viewing the destruction in Ercis via helicopter. At a late night press conference in Van he expressed fears for people in outlying villages. "Because the buildings are made of mud-brick, they are more vulnerable to quakes. I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed," he said. He returned to Ankara to chair a cabinet meeting about the disaster.

Turkey's seismological institute said on Sunday it anticipated a death toll of up to 1,000, but Erdoğan said it was too soon to predict such figures. "We don't know how many people are in the ruins of collapsed buildings, it would be wrong to give a number."

The quake was also felt in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and several Iranian towns close to the border, but there were no reports of injuries or damage.

Earthquakes are common in Turkey, which is crossed by a number of faultlines. The most significant one in recent years struck the western city of Izmit in 1999. The official death toll was 17,000, although some reports suggested the real figure was higher. Poorly built housing was blamed for many deaths, and tens of thousands more people were left homeless as other buildings were damaged beyond repair.