By Umit Bektas, Reuters
ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters)—A fiance’s love saved 25-year-old teacher Gul Karacoban from being left to die under the rubble of a restaurant she was eating at when a deadly earthquake struck eastern Turkey.
ERCIS, Turkey (Reuters)—A fiance’s love saved 25-year-old teacher Gul Karacoban from being left to die under the rubble of a restaurant she was eating at when a deadly earthquake struck eastern Turkey.
Brought out alive on Monday along with two colleagues, after 18 hours
pinned under a mound of concrete and masonry, she was stretchered into an
ambulance while paramedics assured her desperate fiance she would be alright.
“All I want is for her to live, I don’t care if she injured or not. It
doesn’t matter, I just want her alive,” air force Lieutenant Onur Eryasar told
a Reuters photographer before climbing into the ambulance.
When the quake struck, Eryasar rushed from his base in Van to the town
of Ercis some 100 km (60 miles) away to find Karacoban, and by talking
with her friends and colleagues he learnt where she had gone to lunch.
Finding the restaurant in the dark, he shouted out her name. Hearing the
voices of other people trapped in the collapsed building he persuaded one of
the rescue teams to begin digging.
By late Monday morning his perseverance was rewarded as the young woman
was carried out, alive and conscious.
