Snowfall in quake-hit Turkey as toll passes 500

Snow blanketed eastern Turkey Thursday, complicating rescue efforts and bringing more misery for the thousands left homeless by a devastating earthquake as the death toll surged past 530. Ninety-one hours after disaster struck in the eastern province of Van, rescuers pulled a 19-year-old from the rubble in the town of Ercis but the prospects of finding more people alive were fading fast. After the government acknowledged failings in the initial rescue efforts, help from abroad was beginning to arrive, including an aid plane from Israel. But in a sign of the disillusionment with the help they had received so far, some families who had been staying in tents began returning to their homes despite warnings that they were still at risk of collapse from aftershocks. Many families have been forced to sleep in overcrowded tents or even out in the open around fires as the temperatures dropped to below freezing. In its latest damage assessment bulletin, the prime minister's emergency unit said that 534 people were now known to have died after the 7.2 magnitude quake struck. A further 2,300 had been injured in the disaster, it added. A total of 185 people had been pulled out of the wreckage, officials said. A 5.4 magnitude aftershock struck the southeastern town of Yuksekova, near the Iraqi border on Thursday morning, although no damage has yet been reported. With hopes of finding anyone else alive receding, the focus was shifting to how to help survivors. The arrival of an Israeli plane carrying five pre-fabricated homes to provide shelter was a powerful symbol of the change of heart by the government which had initially refused help from abroad. Relations between Turkey and Israel have been toxic in recent months in the wake of a deadly raid by Israeli commandos last year on an aid vessel bound for the Gaza Strip. "Three more planes loaded with aid supplies will come to Turkey within two days," Nizar Amer, an official from the Israeli embassy in Ankara, told Anatolia. Foreign ministry spokesman Selcuk Unal on Thursday said diplomatic relations with Israel and humanitarian aid were two separate issues, Anatolia reported. "We never mix the humanitarian issues with the political ones." Unal said 14 countries as well as United Nations bodies would send help to Turkey, including Britain, France, Russia, Jordan and Belgium. The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had donated 400 family-sized tents while the UN refugee agency had sent 4,000 tents, 50,000 blankets and 10,000 bed mats. A 150-person rescue team from Azerbaijan was already in the quake zone, the first foreign team to arrive. After widespread overnight snowfalls in the region, forecasters said the weather pattern would remain the same until the end of the week. Huseyin Celik, deputy head of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP), said that the earthquake had affected 700,000 people in the region and up to 115,000 tents were needed. The prosecutor's office in Ercis meanwhile began an investigation into the construction companies that put up collapsed buildings, Anatolia said. In Van province 3,713 buildings, home to 5,250 families, had been destroyed, the prime minister's emergency unit said. There have been frequent complaints among residents of the mainly Kurdish region that the Ankara government would have acted faster if disaster had struck elsewhere. "We did not discriminate between Turks, Kurds or Zaza people.... We said that they are all our people," Erdogan said on Wednesday as he defended his government's handling of the aid operation. But the revelation from the Turkish Red Crescent that 17 aid trucks had been raided in Van and Ercis highlighted the sense of despair among survivors. Locals in Ercis recounted seeing the driver of one of the trucks assaulted before his attackers made off with food and blankets.