Relief teams were late, say survivors

For 48 hours, Ertekin had been waiting in front of the collapsed building where his mother was buried in the hope that search teams might find her body. “Yesterday evening Army units finally started work here but they stopped after 20 minutes because it was sundown,” he said. “Today an excavator took over so there’s no chance of any survivors.” Ertekin prays only that his mother’s remainswill be restored to him in one piece.

A medical student from Izmir, who together with 15 others has been operating an ambulance shuttle, described how some of the inhabitants had attacked rescue teams. “They went mad when they saw no one was coming to their aid and that people were being left to suffer in the ruins for two days,” he explained. The student sympathised with the locals.

“Until today practically the only people on the scene were 70 Russians and the Turkish civil volunteer organisation Akut,” he said. “Despite their goodwill they had neither the equipment to smash through cement nor cranes to lift rubble. “Now the bodies are beginning to decompose under the rubble but nobody seems to care about the infection risk.” From dawn to dusk the inhabitants of Golcuk have been working non-stop, digging, shifting bricks, tearing at walls to try to find bodies.