Turkey quake death toll exceeds 260, hundreds missing

ERCIS, Turkey, Oct 24 (Reuters): Rescuers clawed through rubble on Monday to free people trapped by a powerful earthquake that killed at least 264 people and wounded more than 1,000 in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey. Hundreds more were feared dead, as Turkey's most powerful quake in a decade toppled remote villages of mud brick houses. As some desperate survivors cried for help from beneath mounds of smashed concrete and twisted metal, earthmoving machines and soldiers joined the search 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. "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. A Reuters photographer saw a woman and her daughter being freed from beneath a concrete slab in the wreckage of a building that had once been six stories tall. "I'm here, I'm here," the woman, named Fidan, called out in a hoarse voice. Talking to her regularly while working for more than two hours to find a way through, rescuers cut through the slab, first sighting the daughter's foot, before freeing them. Standing by a wrecked four-storey building one woman told a rescue worker she had spoken to her friend, Hatice Hasimoglu,on her mobile phone six hours after the quake trapped her inside. "She's my friend and she called me to say that she's alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building," said her friend, a fellow teacher. "She told me she was wearing red pajamas," she said, standing with distraught relatives begging the rescue workers to hurry. 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 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants. 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. NTV broadcaster quoted Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin as saying the death toll had reached 264. Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, speaking in Van, said more than 1,300 were injured. The interior minister said hundreds more were unaccounted for, many believed buried under rubble. 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.