The death toll from two major earthquakes that struck southeastern Turkey on Feb. 6 has risen to 40,642, the country’s disaster agency said Saturday.
Search and rescue efforts will be largely completed as of Sunday evening, Yunus Sezer, head of the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said at a press conference.
The emergency work was concentrated in southern Hatay province, which was hit hardest in last week’s quakes, he said, adding that the disaster agency had nearly 13,000 personnel working in the area.
A total of 430,000 people were evacuated from the earthquake area, Sezer said.
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Turkey’s southern province of Kahramanmaras at 4:17 a.m. local time (0117 GMT), followed by a magnitude 6.4 quake a few minutes later in the country’s southern province of Gaziantep and a magnitude 7.6 earthquake at 1:24 p.m. local time (1024 GMT) in the Kahramanmaras Province.
Turkey said on Sunday that at least 10,633 Syrian refugees in the country have returned to their homeland voluntarily after the devastating earthquakes that hit southern Turkey earlier this month.
“Our Syrian brothers, who lost their families and places of stay in the earthquake, returned to their lands voluntarily,” Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said during his visit to the military border outposts in the quake-hit southern province of Hatay.
The minister refuted the allegations that Syrians were flooding into the Turkish border after the massive earthquakes which also hit northern Syria, the semi-official Anadolu Agency reported.
“These claims are completely untrue. There is no crossing from the border gate or the borderline. We received information from the relevant authorities and conducted on-site investigations. Contrary to the claim that there is an intense crossing to Turkey, they stated that Syrian citizens pass from Turkey to Syria in one direction,” the Anadolu quoted Akar as saying.
Turkey hosts nearly 3.5 million Syrian refugees that fled their country after a civil war erupted in 2011. Nearly half of the refugees have been taking shelter in southern Turkey which was recently hit by devastating quakes that have caused tremendous destruction in the region.
