ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish rescuers pulled a man alive from the rubble Wednesday more than 100 hours after he was buried by last Friday's quake.
The man, 42-year-old Sefa Cebeci, was rushed to hospital in Istanbul and was under intensive care suffering from exhaustion, a broken arm and kidney malfunction.
The state-run Anatolian news agency said rescue workers pulled Cebeci from under the concrete of a ruined building in the town of Duzce, where the tremor of 7.2 on the Richter scale buried him.
First reports from the scene had given Cebeci's first name as Sefer and identified him as a woman.
He was rescued a day after many foreign rescue teams pulled out of the quake zone in northwestern Turkey saying cold weather made further survival all but impossible for anyone under the rubble.
The death toll stood at 550 on Wednesday, according to figures released by the official crisis management center. More than 3,200 people were injured.
The quake was the second major tremor to hit Turkey in three months. A shock measuring 7.4 on the Richter scale killed more than 17,000 people in August.
The two quakes have made more than half a million people homeless and strained Turkey's ability to provide food and shelter as the harsh Anatolian winter sets in.
Homeless victims in Duzce and Bolu, the quake region's capital city, have complained about inadequate provision for survivors. Many are spending freezing nights in makeshift huts of wood and plastic sheeting.
Even if their homes are still standing, the aftershocks shaking the area are making nearly everyone unwilling to venture indoors.
The average winter temperature in the hilly quake region falls well below freezing and rainfall is high.
President Clinton, his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea visited tents housing some 9,000 survivors of the August quake on Tuesday.
Clinton is on a five-day visit to Turkey for a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe which starts in Istanbul on Thursday.
Officials say the summit will go ahead despite warnings from seismologists that Istanbul could be due for an earthquake. The quake experts cannot say when such a tremor would take place.