Team effort: MAS-01 SMART personnel are among the rescue workers pulling a survivor out from the rubble in Nurdagi. — Photo from Twitter account of Turkiye’s IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation
GAZIANTEP (Turkiye): The MAS-01 SMART team managed to rescue five earthquake victims trapped in the ruins of a six-storey residential building in Nurdagi here.
Its commander, Mohd Khairul Jamil said the victims pulled from the rubble of the collapsed building at 2.20pm local time (7.20pm Malaysian time) yesterday were two women, an adult man and two teenagers – a girl and a boy.
“The team went to the area which is about 1.3km from Nurdagi Stadium, where we are stationed, at 11am today (4pm Malaysia time) and managed to locate the five victims at 1pm (6pm local time) with the use of special equipment,” he told Bernama.Mohd Khairul said the team was currently tracking down a baby and had mobilised a second team to the same area to help locate survivors.The MAS-01 SMART team also found the bodies of six earthquake victims in a seven-storey hotel and residential building that collapsed in Nurdagi here.
Five bodies – a woman and four men – believed to be part of a family, were found at 9.30am local time (2.30pm Malaysian time) on Friday while the sixth body, of a woman, was found at 2.10pm (7.10pm Malaysian time).
The MAS-01 SMART team is the search and rescue (SAR) team from Malaysia that was deployed to Turkiye last Monday, Bernama reported.On Wednesday, the Malaysian government deployed another SAR team consisting of 20 members of the Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team (SMART), 30 members of the Malaysian Fire and Rescue Department, and 20 Civil Defence Force officers.
Also joining the team were two media members from the National News Agency of Malaysia (Bernama) and a cameraman from Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM).
Nurdagi is one of the areas in Gaziantep that was badly affected following the strong earthquake that hit southern Turkiye on Monday.Upon their arrival on Friday at 3am local time (8am Malaysian time), the team found residential buildings had collapsed completely.
The area assigned to the MAS-01 SMART team was previously a seven-storey hotel and residential building where more than 100 people were killed.
Many survivors gathered around the ruins to watch the SAR efforts carried out by locals and Malaysian rescue teams in the hope of seeing their family members found alive.
However, chances of victims being found alive were very slim because they would have been trapped for a long time in extreme cold weather with readings as low as 3°C during the day, which can drop to -6°C at night.
Most of the survivors are still in the area and taking shelter in tents provided by the Disaster and Emergency Management Pre- sidency, a Turkyish government disaster management agency.
Due to the extreme cold weather, many of them were sleeping or gathered by a fire to keep warm.
It is understood that members of the MAS-01-SMART team also did the same. Some said they only slept for two or three hours due to the cold weather.
The strong earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale that hit southern Turkiye and northwestern Syria on Monday, has claimed thousands of lives. Aftershocks were also felt in Cyprus and Lebanon.
The death toll in Turkiye continues to rise, now at over 24,000 while more than 80,000 others were injured, as reported by Anadolu Agency, citing the country’s disaster agency on Friday.
Turkiye, on Tuesday, declared a three-month state of emergency in 10 provinces – Adana, Adıyaman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kahramanmaras, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye and Sanliurf – to aid search and rescue operations.
Meanwhile, in KUALA LUMPUR, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim conveyed his condolences to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and offered prayers for quake victims. In a Twitter post on Saturday, Anwar said that he had contacted the Turkish President as soon as he arrived from Bangkok, Thailand after a two-day official visit that began on Thursday.
“The Malaysian government has sent two SMART rescue teams and built a field hospital, in addition to donation drives,” he said.
