Another earthquake hit southern Turkey on Monday - killing one person and causing buildings to collapse - three weeks after the region was rocked by a catastrophic tremor that left almost 50,000 people dead.
The tremor was centred in the town of Yesilyurt in Malatya province, said the country’s disaster management agency and was registered as magnitude 5.7.
Yesilyurt’s mayor Mehmet Cinar told HaberTurk television that a few buildings had collapsed in the town.
Media reports said two people were believed to be trapped in the rubble of one building.
Malatya was among 11 Turkish provinces that were hit hard by the major magnitude 7.8 earthquake that devastated parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6.
That quake led to more than 48,000 deaths in both countries as well as the collapse or serious damage of 173,000 buildings in Turkey.
AFAD, Turkey’s disaster management agency, said close to 10,000 aftershocks have hit the region affected by the quake since February 6.
Among them was a fresh 6.4 magnitude earthquake that struck the Turkey-Syria border last Monday.
The February 6 earthquake marked Turkey’s deadliest disaster in the modern era.
Hundreds of thousands of apartments were among huge swathes of buildings destroyed in the quake, leaving people buried beneath rubble in freezing temperatures.
Turkey has arrested 184 people suspected of complicity in the collapse of buildings in this month’s earthquakes and investigations are widening, a minister said on Saturday.
