GAZIANTEP : \u00a0Members of the Special Malaysia\u00a0Disaster Assistance and\u00a0Rescue Team\u00a0(SMART) were struck by\u00a0disbelief and shock\u00a0when they discovered and rescued\u00a0five members of a family\u00a0who were trapped in the rubble of their residential building for the past six days on Saturday as a result of the devastating earthquake that hit this area.
\nSMART MAS-01 search and rescue operations officer (SAR) Insp Muhamad Zul Khairi Idris said the cry of \u2018takbir\u2019\u00a0(Allahuakbar) when the first victim –\u00a0a teenage boy –\u00a0was taken out at 1.20 pm (6.20 pm Malaysian time) almost brought the team into tears.
\nHowever, keeping their feelings in check, Muhamad Zul Khairi and his group members knew that they were shouldering a great responsibility and expectation from the local people to rescue those trapped.
\nOne by one, the remaining victims were\u00a0successfully taken out by 2.20 pm (7.20 pm Malaysian time) in safe condition before being handed over to the local medical team.
\nMuhamad Zul Khairi said his team of 24 members and a tracking dog (Frankie) had headed to the new search area following\u00a0information from the reconnaissance team located 1.3 km from the national rescue team camp at Nurdagi Stadium at 11 am local time (4 pm Malaysian time).
\n“At 1 pm (6 pm Malaysian time) the\u00a0local team at the ground said there was a sound coming from under the rubble, we then used the Life Detector Six Sensor System and Victim Simulator (Delsar) equipment to successfully locate the victims who were trapped two metres under the rubble.
\n“At first we expected there to be three victims, but after\u00a0communicating\u00a0through the Delsar equipment the victims said there were five of them trapped together in a room under the rubble,” he told Bernama and Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) here today.
\nThe\u00a0cold and dusty weather in\u00a0Nurdagi which\u00a0had reached almost\u00a0one degree Celsius at the time was the last thing on the minds of the\u00a0team members as they dug up\u00a0and removed obstacles to open a safe space to evacuate the victims.
\nMuhamad Zul Khairi said his team used special tools to cut the entangled concrete irons, while load-bearing\u00a0struts were used to open a tunnel-like space to allow the rescue team to take out the victims.<\/p>\n
The five victims were the first to be found safe by the national SAR team since being deployed here.
\nAs of the time of reporting, the national rescue team has brought out 25 bodies and five survivors.
\nA large earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale that hit southern Turkiye and northwestern Syria on\u00a0Monday has claimed thousands of lives.
\nAftershocks were also felt in Cyprus and Lebanon.
\nThe death toll from the earthquake in southern Turkiye has risen to at least 7,108 people while over 40,000 are reported injured.
\nTurkiye on Tuesday declared a three-month state of emergency in 10 provinces, namely Adana, Adiyaman, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep, Hatay, Kahramanmaras, Kilis, Malatya, Osmaniye and Sanliurfa, to ensure the smooth running of the SAR mission.
\n— BERNAMA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GAZIANTEP : \u00a0Members of the Special Malaysia\u00a0Disaster Assistance and\u00a0Rescue Team\u00a0(SMART) were struck by\u00a0disbelief and shock\u00a0when they discovered and rescued\u00a0five members of a family\u00a0who were trapped in the rubble of their residential building for the past six days on Saturday as a result of the devastating earthquake that hit this area. SMART MAS-01 search and rescue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":18457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18456","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18458,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18456\/revisions\/18458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jesseltontimes.com\/wpmarch2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}