JUAKE DISASTER: SURVIVORS AFTER 100HRS - JOY IN A LIVING HELL

Boy of three and 10-day-old among saved | World rallies but fears grow for the trapped

- CHRIS HUGHES

RESCUERS have saved earthquake victims more than 100 hours after disaster struck but hopes were fading for those still trapped. 

Thousands of children may be among more than 22,000 killed in the tremor that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday, but stories of survival still remained.

Emergency workers pulled four-year-old Yagiz Komsu from debris 105 hours after the quake hit, before also reaching his injured mother Ayfer Komsu.

Crowds who looked on in Adiyaman in Turkey were asked not to cheer to avoid scaring the child, who was given a jelly bean for sustenance.

A 10-day-old baby and his mother were also saved 90 hours after a building collapsed. The boy, also called Yagiz, had spent almost half his life under concrete in Hatay province.

But audible cries for help were fading after what Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan called “the disaster of the century”. The magnitude 7.8 quake has already killed more than the 18,400 victims of Japan’s Fukushima earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

Relatives in Turkey wept as rescuers pulled 17-year-old Adnan Muhammed Korkut from a base-ment in Gaziantep, near the epicentre. He had been trapped for 94 hours, forced to drink his own urine.

"Thank God you arrived," he said, embracing his mother. One of the rescuers, identified only as Yasemin, hugged him as she said: "I've a son just like you. I swear I have not slept for four days... I was trying to get you out."