Photo By REUTERS/Reuters TV/REUTERS
The baby girl, rescued from a building that collapsed during an earthquake, rests in an incubator in a hospital in Ercis, near the eastern Turkish city of Van, in this still image
ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters) - Rescuers pulled a two-week-old baby girl alive from the wreckage of a collapsed apartment block Tuesday as they battled to find survivors from a earthquake in eastern Turkey that killed at least 432 people and left thousands homeless.
The baby's mother and a grandmother were also brought out alive on stretchers to jubilant cries from onlookers who followed the dramatic rescue under cold, pouring rain.
"It's a miracle!," said Senol Yigit, the uncle of the baby, Azra, whose name means "purity" or "untouched" in Arabic. "I'm so happy. What can I say. We have been waiting for two days. We had lost hope when we first saw the building," he said sobbing.
However, hope of finding more people alive under tonnes of rubble faded with every passing hour as rescuers pulled out more bodies.
The death toll from the 7.2-magnitude quake rose to 432, from an earlier 366, the Disaster and Emergency Administration said. The final count was likely to rise further as many people were still missing and 2,262 buildings had collapsed.
Thousands slept for a second night in crowded tents or huddled around fires and in cars across a region rattled by aftershocks in Van province, near the Iranian border.
The center of Van, a city of one million, resembled a ghost town, and in the hard-hit town of Ercis thousands of people roamed the streets.
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