Rescuers pulled a 35-year-old man alive from rubble in Turkey’s Hatay province six days after Monday’s deadly earthquake. Turkey And Syria exceeded 28,000 and is expected to increase even further.

According to the Turkish television channel CNN Turk, 149 hours after the earthquake, a group of Romanian rescuers managed to pull 35-year-old Mustafa out from under the rubble of the building. “He is in good health, he talked,” said one of the rescuers.

Looting in affected areas

Yesterday Saturday, lifeguard Gizem from the southeastern province of Sanlıurfa said she saw people looting in Antakya. “We can’t interfere since most of them have knives.”

Police and soldiers are trying to maintain order, control traffic and help with rescue operations and food distribution.

Over a million homeless

About 80,000 people have been hospitalized and the number of homeless people has crossed a million, according to Turkish authorities. As the basic infrastructure is destroyed, the survivors worry about disease outbreaks.

“If people do not die here, under the rubble, they will die from their injuries. Unlike diseases,” Gizem emphasized. “There are no toilets here. This is a big problem,” he added.

For his part, Martin Griffiths, who is in charge of UN humanitarian operations, described the earthquake as the worst event to hit the region in a century, while he predicted that the death toll would “at least double”.

“I think it’s hard to accurately estimate (the death toll),” but “I’m sure it will double, if not more,” Griffiths told Sky News.

The earthquake is the seventh-deadliest natural disaster on record this century, with a death toll close to that of the 2003 earthquake in Iran that killed 31,000 people.

At the moment, official figures show 24,617 deaths in Turkey and more than 3,500 deaths in Syria, but the numbers have not been updated since Friday.

^{According to REUTERS}