A teenager who was rescued after nearly 5 days beneath rubble in the wake of the Turkey earthquake, told Brit rescuers: “Please bring my Harry Potter books.”
Ikbal Cil, 15, was saved from beneath a collapsed ten-storey tower block in southern Turkish city Kahramanmaras — the town closest to the epicentre of an earthquake which has now killed over 28,000 people.
Two powerful earthquakes hours apart also caused thousands of buildings to collapse and left millions homeless.
The team leader of British rescue charity SARAID, Rob Davies, told the Sun on Sunday: “All that she was interested in, bless her, was her Harry Potter books.
“We had to move them out of the way to get to her but she said through a translator, ‘Can you bring my books with me please as well’.”
Ikbal miraculously survived being buried alive for nearly five days with no food or water, as temperatures fell to a life-threatening -10C.
Dad-of-one Rob said: “We called for complete silence, attached sensors to different parts of rubble and started tapping. People know the tapping is a human action from above, so they will tap back.
“Soon, we could hear a faint tapping. Ikbal was probably screaming, too, but she was so deeply entombed that no one would have heard her.
“The sound-location equipment sometimes doesn’t pick up screaming because of the frequencies.
"And she was under a good four feet of reinforced concrete, with debris on top of her too.”
Alex, a civil engineer from Stansted, Essex, who was also involved in the rescue, told the Sun that she was trapped under a concrete slab, face down with both of her legs pinned.
The 36-year-old said he crawled into the ruins and she grabbed his hand and refused to let go. He continued to comfort her while the team outside removed the rubble.
Twelve people have now detained by the Turkish authorities over collapsed buildings in the south-eastern provinces of Gaziantep and Sanliurfa.
The natural disaster has sparked public anger over the poor quality of housing which was not built with tremor regulations and some say the scale of deaths could have been prevented with better housing stock.
Turkey’s justice ministry has ordered prosecutors in the 10 southern provinces worst affected by the disaster to open special “earthquake crimes investigation offices”, raising the prospect of further arrests.
Also in Turkey’s Hatay province, 35-year-old Ozlem Yilmaz and her six-year-old daughter Hatice were found alive in the ruins after 117 hours. And after 119 hours buried in Kahramanmaras, Kamil Can Agas, 16, asked his rescuers: “What day is it?”
In the same ruined city, a man was pictured smiling yesterday as he was reunited with his cat.
