A teenager was pulled largely unscathed from the rubble of a collapsed building in the Turkish city of Gaziantep early on Friday, four days after the catastrophic earthquake struck.

Before dawn in Gaziantep, near the epicentre of the quake, rescuers pulled Adnan Muhammed Korkut from the basement where had been trapped since the quake on Monday. The 17-year-old smiled at the crowd of friends and relatives who chanted his name, clapped and wept tears of joy as he was carried out and put on to a stretcher.

“Thank God you arrived,” he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance. “Thank you everyone.”

Trapped for 94 hours, but not crushed, the teenager said he had been forced to drink his own urine to slake his thirst.

“I was able to survive that way,” he said.

“I have a son just like you,” a rescue worker, identified only as Yasemin, told him after giving him a warm hug. “I swear to you, I have not slept for four days. I swear I did not sleep; I was trying to get you out.”

/ The Giardian