ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters) ? Rescuers clawed through rubble on Monday to free people trapped by an earthquake that killed at least 239 people and wounded 1,000 in southeast Turkey. Hundreds more were feared dead.
Earthmoving machines and soldiers joined the frantic search through mounds of smashed concrete after Sunday's 7.2 magnitude quake struck the city of Van and the town of Ercis, some 100 km (60 miles) to the north, in Turkey's Kurdish heartland.
"Be patient, be patient," rescuers told a whimpering boy, pinned under a concrete slab with the lifeless hand of an adult, with a wedding ring, visible just in front of his face.
As dawn broke, the scale of devastation became clear.
In Van, an ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by snow-capped mountains, cranes shifted rubble from a collapsed six-storey apartment block where 70 people were feared trapped.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan flew swiftly to Van to assess the scale of the disaster in a quake-prone area that is a hotbed of activity for Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) rebels.
His deputy Besir Atalay, speaking in Van, put the death toll at 239, with 1,150 injured. The interior minister said hundreds more were unaccounted for.
Erdogan said he feared for the fate of villages which rescue teams had yet to reach. "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 told an overnight news conference in Van.
Newspapers said trauma had been piled on trauma in the southeast, where a PKK attack killed 24 Turkish soldiers in Hakkari, south of Van, last week. "Homeland of Pain. Yesterday terrorism, today earthquake," said Radikal newspaper.
Erdogan earlier flew by helicopter to Ercis, a town of 100,000 that was harder hit than Van, with 55 buildings flattened, including a student dormitory. "We don't know how many people are in the ruins of collapsed buildings," he said.
At one crumpled four-storey building in Ercis, firemen from the major southeastern city of Diyarbakir tried to reach four missing children. Aid workers carried two black body bags, one apparently containing a child, to an ambulance. An old woman wrapped in a headscarf walked alongside sobbing.
A distressed man paced back and forth before running towards the rescue workers on top of the rubble. "That's my nephew's house," he sobbed as workers tried to hold him back.
A group of women, some with faces covered by headscarves, wept as they looked on under a chilly blue sky.
COLD NIGHT IN OPEN
Nearby, aid teams handed out parcels of bread and food, while people wrapped in blankets huddled around open fires after spending a cold night on the streets.
Rescue efforts were hampered by power outages after the quake toppled electricity cables to towns and villages across much of the barren Anatolian steppe near the Iranian border. It also damaged the main Van-Ercis road, CNN Turk reported.
More than 100 aftershocks have jolted the region since the quake struck for around 25 seconds at 1041 GMT on Sunday.
"I just felt the whole earth moving and I was petrified. It went on for ages. And the noise, you could hear this loud, loud noise," said Hakan Demirtas, 32, a builder who was working on construction site in Van at the time.
"My house is ruined," he said, sitting on a low wall after spending the night in the open. "I am still afraid, I'm in shock. I have no future, there is nothing I can do."
The Red Crescent said about 100 experts had reached the earthquake zone to coordinate operations. Some 4,000 tents and 11,000 blankets, stoves and food were being distributed.
At Van airport, a Turkish Airlines cargo plane unloaded aid materials onto waiting military vehicles for distribution.
Workers set up a tent city in the Ercis sports stadium, as ambulances, sirens wailing, ferried the injured to hospital.
Dogan news agency reported that 24 people were pulled from the rubble alive in the two hours after midnight.
One nurse told CNN Turk news channel that Ercis hospital was so badly damaged that staff were treating injured in the garden, and bodies were being left outside the building,
Erdogan later returned to Ankara for a cabinet meeting to discuss the response to the disaster. He said Turkey could cope by itself, but thanked nations offering help, including Armenia and Israel, which both have strained relations with Ankara.
U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he was deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation. "He expresses his heartfelt sympathies to the government and people of Turkey at this time of loss and suffering," a U.N. statement said.
The quake had no impact on Turkish financial markets as they opened on Monday. Industry Minister Nihat Ergun said Ankara would provide support for small businesses affected.
In Van, construction worker Sulhattin Secen, 27, said he had first mistaken the quake's rumble for a car crash.
"Then the ground beneath me started moving up and down as if I was standing in water. May God help us. It's like life has stopped. What are people going to do?"
(Additional reporting by Ibon Villelabeitia in Ankara; Writing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Daren Butler; Editing by Alistair Lyon)
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