16 September 2009 / TODAY'S ZAMAN WITH WIRES, İSTANBUL
Search-and-rescue teams continue to search for four people reported missing in the flash floods that swept through Thrace last week, leaving over 40 dead.
The bodies of two missing people -- 8-year-old Berna Çakar and 75-year-old Hikmet Pekgürbüz -- were found by search-and-rescue teams on Monday and Tuesday, increasing the number of confirmed flood victims to 43. Search-and-rescue teams found Çakar's body in the Galata Stream on Tuesday. Pekgürbüz's body was recovered on Monday. Sixty-five-year-old Gülseren Dursun and her granddaughter, 6-year-old Ceyda Gider, who both went missing when flash floods hit İstanbul's Çatalca district on Tuesday, still have not been found. Speaking to the Anatolia news agency, Çatalca District Governor Yüksel Ayhan said teams from the General Directorate of Civil Defense, the gendarmerie and the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality have been searching for Dursun and Gider in the Yeşilköy area, where they are thought to have gone missing. Efforts to find two other missing people in İstanbul's Silivri district are also under way. Search efforts have so far failed to find 76-year-old Nihat Serdiyol and a toddler, Dila Manav, who were swept away by fast-moving waters in the Selimpaşa neighborhood. Silivri District Governor Ahmet Mesut Demirkol said search-and-rescue teams have been working hard to find Serdiyol and Manav. In the meantime, the body of a man who was killed on Wednesday in İstanbul by the floods was exhumed from his grave after it was found that he had been misidentified by relatives, and his body was given to the proper family. Flood victim Hüseyin Türkmenoğlu was thought to have been buried in Gaziantep Cemetery over the weekend. However, it was later discovered that the body buried was not that of Türkmenoğlu but of another flood victim, Necati Topkaya, when Topkaya's relatives noticed that the body given to them was not Topkaya. Topkaya was exhumed on Tuesday under the supervision of a public prosecutor and was buried in İstanbul on the same day.
