Boy’s rescue five days after Turkish quake lifts hearts

ERCIS, Turkey, (Reuters) – Rescue workers pulled a  13-year-old boy alive out of the rubble of an apartment block today, five days after a powerful earthquake that killed at  least 570 people in eastern Turkey.
“It is a great miracle,” Neriman, the boy’s 34-year-old  mother told Reuters. “He told me he prayed and when he said all  his prayers and there were no more left he recited the national  anthem.”
The rescue lifted Turkish spirits as thousands of quake  survivors endured a fifth freezing and wet night without a roof  over their heads, and recriminations flew over the pace of  relief and the shoddy construction that led to so much damage.
The boy, Ferhat Tokay, was put in a neck brace and taken on  a stretcher to a waiting ambulance after being rescued in Ercis,  the town hardest hit by Sunday’s 7.2 magnitude quake, television  images showed.
“We started digging and at first we saw his hand. And then  we started speaking to him. He said ‘I am hungry and thirsty’,”  an exhausted but elated medic, Baris Dogan, told Reuters.
“It was like taking my own son out.”