© Reuters. Arsin and his father carry belongings out of their destroyed apartment after the deadly earthquake in Antakya, Hatay province, Turkey, February 20, 2023. REUTERS/Eloisa Lopezh
By Ece Toksabay and Daren Butler
ANTAKYA/ISTANBUL, Turkey (Reuters) – Turkey has arrested 184 people suspected of being responsible for collapsing buildings in this month’s earthquakes and investigations are expanding, a minister said on Saturday, as anger mounted over what many see. as corrupt construction practices.
Overnight, the death toll from the quakes, the most powerful of which occurred in the dead of night on February 6, rose to 44,128 in Turkey. That brought the total number of deaths in Turkey and neighboring Syria to more than 50,000.
More than 160,000 buildings containing 520,000 apartments collapsed or were badly damaged in Turkey by the disaster, the worst in the country’s modern history.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said more than 600 people had been investigated in connection with the collapsed buildings, during a news conference in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, which is among the 10 provinces affected by the the disaster.
Among those formally arrested and in pretrial detention are 79 construction contractors, 74 people who have legal responsibility for the buildings, 13 owners and 18 people who had made modifications to the buildings, it said.
Many Turks have expressed outrage at what they see as corrupt construction practices and flawed urban developments.
President Tayyip Erdogan, facing the biggest political challenge of his two-decade rule in elections scheduled for June, has vowed accountability.
In Gaziantep province, the mayor of Nurdagi district, who belongs to Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, was among those arrested as part of investigations into the collapsed buildings, state broadcaster TRT Haber and other media reported. .
‘BREAKING MY HEART’
Nearly three weeks after the disaster, there is no final death toll in Turkey and authorities have not said how many bodies may be trapped under the rubble.
A firefighter helping clear rubble in the hard-hit city of Antakya said body parts were being found daily.
“It’s very difficult. You can’t tell a man to keep working if he’s raising someone’s arm,” said the firefighter, who asked not to be named.
Nearly two million people made homeless by the disaster are being accommodated in tents, container houses and other facilities in the region and in other parts of the country, Turkey’s disaster management authority said.
More than 335,000 tents have been erected in the earthquake zone and container house settlements are being established at 130 locations, while nearly 530,000 people have been evacuated from the affected areas, it added.
But near Antakya, Omran Alswed, a Syrian, and his family still live in makeshift shelters.
“Our houses are badly damaged, so we have taken refuge here, in a garden in our neighborhood,” Alswed said.
“The biggest problem is the tents. It’s been 19 days and we still haven’t received a single tent. We also requested to move to a tent camp, but they said the ones nearby are full,” he said.
The only remaining ethnic Armenian village in Turkey, Vakifli, was badly affected by the earthquake, with 30 of its 40 stone houses badly damaged.
“Vakifli is all we have, the only Armenian village in Turkey. It is our home. Seeing it like this breaks my heart,” said Masis, a 67-year-old retired jeweler, who returned to his hometown after spending 17 years. years in Istanbul.
Turkey and Armenia are still at odds over the 1.5 million people Armenia claims were killed in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey. Armenia says this constitutes genocide.
Turkey accepts that many Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire died fighting Ottoman forces during World War I, but disputes the figures and denies that they were systematic.