Turkey: 3-year-old girl rescued 91 hours after quake

A three-year-old girl was pulled out of the rubble alive on Tuesday days after a magnitude 6.6 earthquake hit Turkey's Aegean region.

Ayda Gezgin was rescued in the Bayrakli district of the Aegean Izmir province 91 hours after the quake.

Ayda, the 107th survivor to be rescued, was taken to hospital.

On Twitter, Mehmet Gulluoglu, the head of Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), expressed happiness at the little girl's rescue.

Speaking to reporters following Ayda's rescue, a rescue team member, Nusret Aksoy, said he spotted the struggling young girl waving her hand.

The death toll from a powerful earthquake which hit western Turkey rose to 100 on Tuesday, the country's disaster authority said.

The 7.0 magnitude quake also injured 994 people, the agency known by its Turkish acronym AFAD reported, with 147 still in hospital.

It added that rescue workers in Izmir province were continuing to search tirelessly in five buildings for an unknown number of missing individuals.

Turkey is among the world's most seismically active zones, and has suffered devastating earthquakes in the past, including the 1999 Marmara quake.

The worst hit Turkish town was Bayrakli in Izmir where there was a mixture of celebration and sadness on Monday after a three-year-old girl named Elif Perincek and a 14-year-old named Idil Sirin were rescued from the rubble.

But both lost a sibling each to the disaster which struck on Friday afternoon in the Aegean Sea.

Two teenagers on their way home from school were also killed in Greece.

Turkey has reported over 1,464 aftershocks following the quake, including 44 that were above four in magnitude.

After dozens of buildings were damaged, and with the risk of repeated tremors, thousands of residents were forced to spend a fourth night in tents in Izmir.

The quake is the deadliest in Turkey this year after another disaster hit the eastern provinces of Elazig and Malatya in January, killing over 40 people.

The country is crossed by fault lines and is prone to earthquakes. More than 500 people were killed in a 2011 quake in the eastern city of Van.

In 1999, two powerful quakes killed 18,000 people in northwestern Turkey.

Agencies