At least 85 people have been confirmed dead after the quake struck at 1.41pm local time (11.41 BST), with the highest number of casualties coming from the city of Ercis, a city of 90,000 some 13 miles from the epicentre Tabanli and more than 36 miles north of the provincial capital city of Van. 
 
 The state hospital reported 59 people had died and more than 400 injured were being treated four hours after the quake struck. The area was also hit by a series of aftershocks. 
 
 Many patients are being treated in the garden of the hospital because it lacks sufficient capacity for all the wounded. 
 
 Based on the magnitude of the quake and the state of infrastructure in the region however, Turkey's seismology institute estimated the casualty count between 500 and 1,000. 
 
 "We estimate around 1,000 buildings are damaged and our estimate is for hundreds of lives lost. It could be 500 or 1,000," said Mustafa Erdik, the general manager of the Kandilli Observatory. 
 
 In Van city, which has a population of around 500,000, citizens fled to the streets in panic after the first shock, trying to pull trapped people from under collapsed buildings and debris. 
 
 Nefise Taylan, a management student, was in a student dormitory at Van's Yuzuncu Yil University when the quake hit. 
 
 "Everybody ran outside when the ceiling began to fall," she told The Daily Telegraph over the phone. The dormitory she was in collapsed during the quake. 
 
 "The situation is very bad. We have no electricity." 
 
 Teams from the state Search and Rescue Association's branches in surrounding provinces began to reach the area around 5pm. Search and rescue personnel have also been sent to Van from cities as far away as Istanbul and Kocaeli in the country's northwest. Last night they were scrambling to remove people from the body before nightfall, when temperatures drop close to freezing. 
 
 In anticipation of the pending numbers of homeless, more than 1,000 tents, and 500 food packages have been sent to Van by Turkish Red Crescent, the country's largest humanitarian organisation. 
 
 Offers of aid from countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland and Greece began pouring in hours after the earthquake. Israel, whose relationship with Turkey has deteriorated in the last year, also said they were prepared to offer the Turkish government "any aid they might need". 
 
 Ercis's mayor, Zulfikar Arapoglu, also issued an urgent call for aid on NTV Television. 
 
 "There are so many dead. Several buildings have collapsed, there is too much destruction," he said. "We need urgent aid. We need medics." 
 
 In the district of Celebibag, near Ercis, Mayor Veysel Keser said that countless people were still trapped under rubble. 
 
 "We can hear the screams of people who are under the rubble, in agony," he said. "Student dormitories, hotels and gas stations have collapsed." 
 
 The airport at Van was also damaged, diverting planes to nearby cities and forcing relief teams to travel by road. 
 
 Ercis also experienced the worst infrastructure damage, with 25 to 30 buildings collapsing in the city alone, according to Besir Atalay, the deputy prime minister. 
 
 Sunday's earthquake had a relatively shallow depth of 12.2 miles, according to the US Geological Survey, which is likely to increase the damage wrought. 
 
 Van province lies several hundred miles east of the East Anatolian fault, one of Turkey's most seismically active regions. 
 
 Although the earthquake reportedly affected the surrounding provinces of Diyarbakir and Erzurum, residents in the capital cities of those provinces told The Daily Telegraph they felt nothing when it occurred. 
 
 The earthquake was the largest to strike Turkey since 1999 when two earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7 hit northwest Turkey, killing 18,000. ||||| Baby plucked from Turkey quake rubble 
 
 Updated 
 
 Rescuers have plucked a two-week-old baby, then her mother and finally her grandmother from the rubble of a Turkish earthquake that killed over 400 people. 
 
 The three rescues occurred at two-hour intervals in the town of Ercis, which bore the brunt of Sunday's 7.2 magnitude quake in eastern Van province. 
 
 The first to be saved around midday (local time) was baby Azra Karaduman, just 16 days old, who was whisked by helicopter ambulance to the capital Ankara for medical treatment. 
 
 She had spent some 48 hours under the rubble. 
 
 Then teams pulled out the baby's mother Seniha, who had no life-threatening injuries but needed food and water, rescuers said, adding that she was taken to a field hospital some four kilometres away. 
 
 Seniha was clutching baby Azra to her chest when rescuers reached them. 
 
 Relief workers then saved Azra's 73-year-old grandmother Gulzade Karaduman, who had a foot trapped in the debris. 
 
 She was carried off in an ambulance among cheers and applause. 
 
 I was the happiest person in the world when I held her. Rescuer Kadir Direk 
 
 The baby's father was believed to be still trapped in the rubble along with five or six other people, rescue workers said, adding that sniffer dogs were deployed to locate the living. 
 
 "It is priceless to find someone alive and all my exhaustion is over," said Oytun Gulpinar, the leader of a team of rescuers who had arrived in Ercis after a 32-hour road journey from the western city of Izmir. 
 
 "I got to hold a 16-day-old baby, which is utterly priceless," he added. 
 
 Azra was brought out by Kadir Direk, the smallest member of the Izmir team, who described how he managed to squeeze through the debris and then scoop her off the lap of her mother. 
 
 "I was the happiest person in the world when I held her," said the 35-year-old. 
 
 "When I took her from her mother, she asked me to give her a second name." 
 
 He choose Aysenur, combining the name of the Prophet Mohammed's wife and the word "light". 
 
 Later on Tuesday, rescuers managed to save a 10-year-old boy from the wreckage of his house in the city centre of Van, more than 54 hours after the quake hit. 
 
 Serhat Gul was in the rubble of a seven-storey building, his home, from where his brother and father had been rescued earlier, TV reports said. 
 
 Earlier, search teams working round the clock rescued a pregnant woman and her two children and also dug out a police officer and his wife from their collapsed homes. 
 
 As the body bags piled up and charity Red Crescent warned that hundreds or even thousands of people remained buried under the debris, the rescues sparked joy amid the otherwise grim task. 
 
 The death toll from the quake stands at 432, with more than 1,300 other injured in the country's east. 
 
 As rescuers pulled out more bodies, residents slept around small fires in towns rattled by aftershocks across Van province, near the Iranian border. 
 
 Workers used heavy machinery, jackhammers, shovels, pickaxes and bare hands to comb through smashed concrete and steel. 
 
 Every so often, exhausted rescuers would shout for silence and generators and diggers would stop, straining to hear voices under the wreckage. Seconds later the drone of the machinery would start again. 
 
 "Life has become hell. We are outside, the weather is cold. There are no tents," said Emin Kayram, 53, sitting by a camp fire in the town of Ercis after spending the night with his family of eight in a van parked nearby. 
 
 His nephew was trapped in the rubble of a building behind him, where rescue workers had been digging through the night. 
 
 The space we had was so narrow. People were fighting for more space to survive. I rested my head on a dead man's foot. I know I would be dead now if I had let myself go psychologically. Quake survivor Mesut Ozan Yilmaz, 18 
 
 "He is 18, a student. He is still stuck in there. This is the third day but you can't lose hope. We have to wait here," he said. 
 
 Crowds formed at one demolished building where bystanders said a trapped boy had made contact by mobile phone. 
 
 As a rescue team dug at the rubble, one man screamed at the workers: "Where were you last night? I told you last night there were people here." 
 
 Casualties have been mostly in Ercis and the provincial capital Van. Officials are checking outlying areas. 
 
 "It was like judgment day," said Mesut Ozan Yilmaz, 18, who survived for 32 hours under the rubble of a tea house where he had been passing time with friends. 
 
 Unhurt but lying on a hospital bed under a thick blanket, his face blackened by dust and dirt, Mr Yilmaz gave a chilling account to CNN Turk of how he survived by diving under a table. 
 
 "The space we had was so narrow. People were fighting for more space to survive," Mr Yilmaz said. "I rested my head on a dead man's foot. I know I would be dead now if I had let myself go psychologically." 
 
 As grieving families prepared to bury their dead, others kept vigil by the mounds of concrete rubble and masonry, praying rescue teams would find missing loved ones alive. 
 
 Rescue teams concentrated efforts in Ercis, a town of 100,000 that was worst hit by the 7.2 magnitude tremor. 
 
 Not enough tents 
 
 Residents spent the night outside, fearing to return to their damaged homes. 
 
 "We are afraid. Tremors are happening all the time. Pieces of concrete are falling off buildings," said Farzande Dilmac, 70, pointing to an empty block of flats riven by large cracks. 
 
 "Our people are in a bad state, what can we do?" he said as a score of women, their heads wrapped in coloured scarves, began wailing. 
 
 The Turkish Red Crescent distributed up to 13,000 tents, and was preparing temporary shelter for about 40,000 people, although there were no reliable figures for the homeless. 
 
 Prime minister Tayyip Erdogan's government has received international offers of assistance from dozens of countries around the world, including from former ally Israel, but has so far accepted aid only from Bulgaria, Azerbaijan and Iran. 
 
 The Red Crescent was criticised for failing to ensure that some of the neediest, particularly in villages, received tents as night temperatures plummeted. The government has apologised for the slowness in distributing tents. 
 
 "We were sent 25 tents for 150 homes. Everybody is waiting outside, we've got small children, we've got nothing left," said Ahmet Arikes, the 60-year-old headman of Amik, a village outside Van that was reduced to rubble. 
 
 Television images showed desperate men pushing each other roughly to grab tents from the back of a Red Crescent truck. 
 
 "I didn't think the Red Crescent was successful enough in giving away tents," Huseyin Celik, deputy chairman of the ruling AK Party, told CNN Turk. "I apologise to our people." 
 
 Soon after, the relief agency's chairman told the news channel that 12,000 more tents would reach Van on Tuesday. Deputy prime minister Besir Atalay, overseeing relief operations there, said: "From today there will be nothing our people lack." 
 
 ABC/wires 
 
 Topics: earthquake, turkey 
 
 First posted
– Though the official death toll in the wake of southeast Turkey's earthquake has hit about 270, officials fear that as many as 1,000 people may have been killed in the 7.2 shaker that toppled scores of buildings yesterday. "We estimate some 1,000 buildings are damaged and our estimate is for hundreds of lives lost. It could be 500 or 1,000," said a spokesman for a Turkish seismology institute, reports the Telegraph. Van, a city of some 500,000, was hit particularly hard; rescuers and neighbors are battling exhaustion to dig out trapped residents, reports the BBC. More than 1,000 tents and hundreds of emergency food packages have been sent to the area by the Turkish Red Crescent humanitarian organization, and offers of aid are pouring in from around the world. "There are so many dead," said the mayor of Ercis, another devastated town. "Several buildings have collapsed, there is too much destruction. We need urgent aid. We need medics. We can hear the screams of people who are under the rubble, in agony."