Vigilantes in Turkey’s earthquake-devastated southeast have been rounding up and beating looters found rifling through damaged properties, according to local media reports.

Some video footage also shows how armed looters have been hi-jacking aid trucks, while there is also a video recording that captures an incident when armed looters opened fire at soldiers serving in the region.

Story pic: Two young people released a video demanding that social media users delete footage depicting them as looters. They say that they went to the city centre to obtain medicines for their family and that they were beaten by security forces when returning home.

The worrying scenes come as the death toll from the disaster, including fatalities in northern Syria, passed 25,000 and Martin Griffiths, the UN emergency relief coordinator, warned it was likely to “more than double”. The window where rescuers can still expect to find anyone still alive within the vast number of buildings that collapsed in the February 6 quakes is fast closing. Hope is turning to despair. And anger among many survivors is mounting as they realise they have lost their loved ones after waiting in vain for help beside collapsed buildings for five days or more.

Even three days ago, local media reports and social media shared video were indicating that widespread looting was spreading across quake-struck Turkish localities. Violent events such as a man forcing a rescue worker at gunpoint to work on a particular collapsed building were observed.

Police and soldiers in the region were struggling to rescue rounded up looters from people intent on lynching them. In some posted videos, security forces are seen beating seized looting suspects while there appears to be the perhaps more problematic scenario, suggested by footage, of some unofficial organised groups catching and beating looters.

Paramilitary-type activities remain a big problem in Turkey and the earthquake-hit region, neighbouring Syria, has been something of a battlefield since 2011 when the war in that country broke out.

The BBC, meanwhile, reported on February 11 that unrest in parts of the Turkish provinces impacted by the natural disaster has disrupted rescue efforts. German rescuers and the Austrian army paused search operations, citing clashes between unnamed groups.

An Austrian army spokesperson said that clashes between unidentified groups in Hatay province left dozens of personnel from the Austrian Forces Disaster Relief Unit seeking shelter in a base camp with other international organisations.

"There is increasing aggression between factions in Turkey… The chances of saving a life bears no reasonable relation to the safety risk," Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Kugelweis said in a statement.

"There are more and more reports of clashes between different factions, shots have also been fired," Stefan Heine, a spokesperson of the German branch of the search and rescue group ISAR, said.

He expected security to worsen as food, water and hope became scarcer.

It occurs to your correspondent that Turkey loves dancing on the edge of a cliff. It often cracks its head open, but it has not fallen over the edge so far. The country quickly gets used to the new cracks on its head and goes on dancing.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that it will never fall. The earthquake region is, of course, at a profoundly critical juncture, neighbouring, as it does, jihadist-held parts of Syria.