A joint rescue team of Bangladesh continues to play its part in the rescue effort in Turkey for the sixth day following last Monday's earthquake, the deadliest such disaster since the country's founding 100 years ago.

The Bangladesh team has so far wrested a 17-year-old girl from the rubble and recovered 22 bodies, Shahjahan Sikder, deputy assistant director of the fire service headquarters media cell, said Wednesday.

The rescuers were among thousands of local and overseas teams, including Turkish coal miners and experts aided by sniffer dogs and thermal cameras, who scoured pulverized apartment blocks for signs of life.

The Bangladesh team consisting of 34 members from the army and 12 from the fire service left Dhaka Wednesday at 10pm and reached Turkey's Adana Military Air Base Thursday at 9:46pm.

Later, they reached Adiyaman city in southeastern Turkey and started search and rescue operations, Shahjahan said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced Tuesday that more than 35,000 people died in Turkey as a result of last week's earthquake. Confirmed deaths in Turkey surpassed those recorded from the Erzincan earthquake in 1939 which killed around 33,000 people.

The quake and hundreds of aftershocks, some nearly as powerful as the first, struck southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6, killing more than 39,000 and reducing whole swaths of towns and cities inhabited by millions to fragments of concrete and twisted metal, reported AP yesterday.

While the death toll is almost certain to rise even further, many of the tens of thousands of survivors left homeless were still struggling to meet basic needs, like finding shelter from the bitter cold.