SINGAPORE, Feb 9 — A team of 20 Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) officers have rescued a boy trapped in a collapsed building in Turkiye after a massive earthquake struck the country on Monday (Feb 6).
In a Facebook post on Thursday, SCDF said that the boy was rescued from a bedroom in a collapsed three-storey building at about 11:45pm local time (4.45am Singapore time) on Wednesday, after a three-hour rescue operation.
The boy’s age was not stated in SCDF’s post.
The officers were part of an advance team from SCDF’s Operation Lionheart contingent which had landed in Adana, Turkiye, on Wednesday. They had headed to Dulkadiroglu in Turkiye’s Kahramanmaras province to begin search and rescue operations, said SCDF.
The team worked together with local rescuers, and a team from Spain, to rescue the boy.
“In the course of the search and rescue operations amidst the cold weather (about 2℃), a boy was found in a collapsed three-storey building,” said SCDF.
“The Spanish rescue team used their search canine to pinpoint the location of the boy and SCDF used a fibre-optic scope to confirm the visuals of the boy,” it added.
All three rescue teams used their cutting and breaking equipment to create an access through the rubble to reach the boy.
The 7.8-magnitude quake, which struck near the Turkish city of Gaziantep before dawn on Monday, has killed at least 11,200 people in Turkiye and neighbouring Syria. — TODAY
