International
Turkey-Syria earthquake updates: death toll passes 25,000 as Erdoğan warns against looting
The death toll from Monday’s earthquake has now risen beyond 25,000 – including 21,848 people who have died in Turkey and a reported 3,553 in Syria.
- UN emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said the death toll from the earthquake is likely to “more than double”, adding that he expected tens of thousands more deaths. Griffiths, who visited the Turkish province of Kahramanmaraş on Saturday, described the earthquake as the “worst event in 100 years in this region”.
- At least 870,000 people urgently need food in the two countries after the quake, which has made up to 5.3 million people homeless in Syria alone, the UN warned.
- Search operations continue with one boy reportedly stretchered out of the rubble in Turkey after 128 hours.
- A spokesman for the UN secretary-general told the BBC it was time “to put all politics aside” to deliver aid to Syria. Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN secretary general, António Guterres, added that it was “hard to imagine a more complex emergency” in Syria. He said the UN was working “as quickly as possible” to get aid to rebel-held areas.
- The WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reportedly visited Aleppo on Saturday.
- Turkey’s president, Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, has warned that looters will be punished after reports of people taking goods in earthquake-hit areas.
- Two German aid organisations have suspended rescue operations in Turkey over security problems.
- A border gate between Turkey and Armenia has been opened for the first time in 35 years to allow aid to reach those affected in southern Turkey, state-owned Anadolu news agency and a diplomat said.
- Turkish energy company Karadeniz Holding said on Saturday it would send two humanitarian aid ships that can each house 1,500 people, to help the relief effort in the southern province of Hatay, Turkey, Reuters reports.
- Turkish police have detained 12 people over collapsed buildings in the southeastern provinces of Gaziantep and Şanlıurfa following the huge quake that hit Turkey, local media reported on Saturday.
