Turkish authorities left retired prison officer Suleyman Samar for dead in the crushed concrete and twisted metal of his collapsed apartment block, before his unwitting saviour rolled in on an excavator.

Mr Samar was buried alive for 88 hours near the body of his mother in the ruins of their second-floor flat, in the devastated port city of İskenderun in the Hatay Province of south-east Türkiye. 

The man in his 60s was straddled between a tipped sofa and a collapsed wall on Thursday afternoon, more than three days after the earthquakes that killed 25,000 and left millions homeless in Türkiye and neighbouring north-west Syria.

But a new threat loomed just metres away from him. The digging bucket of an excavator was about to plunge into the wreckage. 

The machine's operator, Sinom Cente, had driven with 10 excavators from the nearby city of Adana to help find survivors, beating official rescue workers. 

They failed to arrive in the badly hit Hatay region for days, fuelling boiling anger against the Turkish government among survivors who were forced to search for loved ones on their own. 

With still too few rescuers in the quake zone and a faltering government response, survival for those buried alive now depends on a stroke of luck. 

Just before the digging started, a voice rang out

When Mr Cente rolled in to remove the rubble from Mr Samar's building, police gave him the all-clear.

"The police came with dogs and told us there was no one alive on the site," said Mr Cente. 

"But relatives came to us and said there might still be someone alive, so please be careful with the excavator." 

Mr Samar's family frantically intervened, shouting into the rubble to ask if anyone was alive. 

A frail voice emerged from within, triggering a meticulous rescue operation. 

As the operation continued for hours under the sleeping arm of the excavator, Mr Samar could be heard yelling that it was becoming harder to breathe. 

Amid his pleas to pull him out, rescuers moved carefully, retrieving children's books, a kitchen pot and — with cautious handling — a Koran.

They drilled a hole through the wall against which his head was pressed, fearing any false move could send it crashing down on him. 

His family, already grappling with a mountain of grief, watched anxiously in a crowd of onlookers desperate for some happy news. 

"When people talk to him, he's saying, 'I'm OK, I'm good'," said his nephew, Emre Insaat. 

"Maybe, psychologically, he's trying to keep up morale, but we don't know." 

Unbeknownst to Mr Samar, at least four members of his family had already been found dead in the ruins of İskenderun over the past four days. 

Fears grow of a second disaster

Nearby, the hospital was so overwhelmed by the influx of corpses that a rancid stench wafted from the emergency room doors.