A new earthquake shakes Turkey and Syria – three dead and hundreds wounded
“Turkey has shifted from three to six meters to the west”
After the earthquake hit the Turkish-Syrian border area, hopes of finding more survivors were fading. “A lot of people are incredibly angry with the government,” reports WELT correspondent Marion Sendker from Istanbul.
Two more earthquakes rocked the area on Monday evening. At least three people were killed and 213 injured in Turkey. More than 130 people have been injured in Syria. Foreign Minister Berbuck and Interior Minister Weser planned a trip to the territories on Tuesday.
zTwo weeks after a devastating earthquake struck southeastern Turkey, more quakes of magnitude 6.4 and 5.8 rocked the region. The epicenter was in the Samandag district of Hatay province, according to Istanbul’s Kandilli Earthquake Observatory on Monday. At least three people were killed. Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said Monday evening that 213 others had been taken to hospitals. According to the White Helmets relief organization, more than 130 people have been injured in northern Syria, and several damaged homes have collapsed.
CNN Turk reported that people ran into the streets in panic and that electricity was cut off in Hatay. Hatay Mayor Lutvu Savvas warned that the earthquakes will continue. Twitter called for staying away from buildings at risk of collapsing. The state-run Anadolu news agency reported that the government hospital in the coastal town of Iskenderun was evacuated.
According to media reports, the earthquake was felt by residents in the neighboring provinces of northern Syria, Israel, Iraq and Lebanon. A spokeswoman for the SAMS relief organization said that houses collapsed again in several places near the city of Aleppo. Among them is the small town of Jenderes near the Turkish border, which was hit hard by the earthquake two weeks ago.
A resident near the Syrian city of Aleppo said that the tremor was as strong as the earthquake that occurred two weeks ago, but it did not last long. “It scared people and made them run into the streets,” said one of the residents, Abdul Kafi. “Many people have left their homes and are roaming the streets, fearing more attacks,” UNHCR spokeswoman for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in the area, Rula Amin, wrote on Twitter.[الزلازل]including in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
Early in the morning of February 6, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake rocked southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, followed hours later by a second, intense tremor with a magnitude of 7.6 on the Richter scale. Either way, the epicenter was in the southern Turkish province of Kahramanmaras. More than 47,000 people have died, including more than 41,000 in Turkey.
German Foreign Minister Analina Berbock and Interior Minister Nancy Weser also plan to visit the quake zone in southeastern Turkey on Tuesday. During the one-day visit, the two politicians would like to get an idea of the situation at the site, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry announced in Berlin on Monday. It is also planned to visit Kahramanmaras, northwest of Gaziantep.
According to the information, Berbock and Weisser also wish to speak to German relief organizations during the visit. In addition, there is the question of how to implement the decision of the federal government, according to which earthquake victims should be able to come to their relatives in Germany for some time without bureaucracy. It is still not clear how much the new earthquakes will affect the flight.
