A 6.4 magnitude earthquake has struck southern Turkey, weeks after a lethal quake devastated the area.
Turkey’s catastrophe and emergency company Afad mentioned the tremor occurred at 20.04 native time (17.04 GMT).
Witnesses instructed the Reuters information company there had been additional harm to buildings in Antakya.
A 7.8-magnitude quake struck the area on 6 February, killing greater than 44,000 people in Turkey and Syria.
The mayor of Hatay, in southern Turkey, has mentioned people are trapped under rubble after the most recent earthquake.
The Turkish vp mentioned at the least eight people have been injured.
Turkish authorities have recorded greater than 6,000 aftershocks since that earthquake hit, however the BBC’s workforce in the area mentioned at the moment’s tremor felt a lot stronger than earlier ones.
Witnesses mentioned it was additionally felt in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon.
There’s worry and panic and small aftershocks maintain coming. Traces of ambulances and rescue crews try to get to among the worst affected areas the place the partitions of badly broken buildings have collapsed.
Plenty of constructions that had been left standing after the tremor on February 6 have now crumbled, together with a bridge. Many cracks in roads have grow to be deep scars making it tougher for the emergency companies to get the place they could be wanted.
Muna Al Omar, a neighborhood resident, instructed Reuters she was in a tent in a park in central Antakya when the earthquake hit.
“I assumed the earth was going to separate open under my toes,” she mentioned, crying as she held her seven-year-old son.
“Is there going to be one other aftershock?” she requested.
An AFP journalist reported on scenes of panic in Antakya – which was already devastated by the earlier earthquake – with the most recent tremors elevating clouds of mud in town.
The partitions of badly broken buildings additionally crumbled, AFP stories, with a number of apparently injured people calling for assist.
Ali Mazlum mentioned he was searching for the our bodies of relations from the earlier earthquake when the most recent one hit.
“You do not know what to do… we grabbed one another and proper in entrance of us, the partitions began to fall. It felt just like the earth was opening as much as swallow us up,” he mentioned.
Antakya, the capital of Turkey’s Hatay Province, was one of many locations hit most severely by the earthquake on 6 February.
In a tweet, Afad urged people to avoid coastlines as a precaution in opposition to the chance of rising sea ranges, though the warning was later eliminated.
In Syria, the White Helmets civil defence group mentioned a number of people had been injured by falling buildings.
The Syrian American Medical Society Basis mentioned that 5 of its hospitals obtained at the least 30 people with accidents from the most recent earthquake, including that harm to its medical services “seems to be minimal”.
