Earthquake death toll tops 33,000, Turkey starts legal action

Nearly a week after one of the most devastating earthquakes to hit Turkey and Syria, rescuers continued to extricate people from the rubble on Sunday as Turkish authorities worked to restore order around the disaster area and started legal proceedings regarding building collapses.

The death toll in both countries following Monday’s earthquake and subsequent aftershocks went past 33,000 and appeared to keep rising as the likelihood of discovering additional survivors decreased. It was Turkey’s deadliest earthquake since 1939.

Business owners evacuated their stores on Sunday in a crucial area of one of the worst affected cities, Antakya in southern Turkey, to save products from being taken by looters.

The security situation has gotten worse, according to locals and humanitarian workers who have traveled from other towns, and there have been several reports of burglaries at businesses and abandoned residences.

President Tayyip Erdogan has stated that the government will deal severely with looters as he prepares for a national election that is anticipated to be the most difficult of his two decades in power and faces criticism over his response to the earthquake.

The calamity in Syria was most severe in the rebel-held northwest, forcing many people who had already been displaced by a decade-long civil war to seek new housing. Compared to places under government control, the region has received relatively little relief.

From the Turkey-Syria border, where there is only one open crossing for U.N. aid supplies, United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths tweeted, “We have so far failed the people in north-west Syria.”

They feel abandoned, and understandably so, Griffiths said, adding that was his first priority.

Washington urged the Syrian government and all other parties to allow quick access to all people in need for humanitarian purposes.

The debris of homes that had become tombs for many thousands of people was still home to a few survivors more than six days after the first earthquake struck.

Syrian Malik Milandi, 54, was rescued by a group of Chinese rescuers and Turkish firefighters after spending 156 hours in the Antakya rubble.

The few remaining structures along the main thoroughfare into the city had extensive fractures or facades that had collapsed in. On occasion, traffic was stopped while rescue workers pleaded for silence to look for indications of undiscovered life beneath the rubble.

Other survivors included a father and daughter, a toddler, and a 10-year-old girl who were rescued from the rubble of collapsed buildings on Sunday, but such moments were becoming increasingly unusual as the death toll continued to rise.

During the unloading of the dead from lorries at a burial close to Reyhanli, veiled women sobbed and beat their chests as some were placed in closed wood coffins, others in uncovered coffins, while still others were simply covered in blankets.

Some locals tried to salvage what they could from the damage.

Mustafa Bahcivan, 32, the proprietor of a mobile shop in Elbistan, the epicenter of an aftershock nearly as strong as Monday’s first 7.8 magnitude quake, said he had been coming into town virtually every day since then. He combed through the debris on Sunday in search of any of his phones that could still be in working order and be able to be sold.

“Previously, this was among the busiest streets. It’s entirely vanished now, “He spoke