Newsman: While rescue workers searching for signs of life in freezing, the death toll from the earthquakes in Turkey and northern Syria rises to 33,179 on Sunday as It seems certain the number to keep increasing as search teams locate more bodies in the rubble. The rescue efforts agonizingly slow as despair bred rage. Turkey’s death toll was 29,605 Sunday afternoon, the country’s interior ministry said. The toll in Syria’s northwestern rebel-held region has reached 2,166, according to the rescue worker group the White Helmets. The overall toll in Syria stood at 3,553 Saturday, though the 1,387 deaths reported for government-held parts of the country hadn’t been updated in days local news media reported.
Rescuers, including crews from other countries, continued to probe the rubble in hope of finding additional survivors who could yet beat the increasingly long odds. Thermal cameras were used to probe the piles of concrete and metal, while rescuers demanded silence so that they could hear the voices of the trapped. Latest, a pregnant woman was rescued Sunday 157 hours after the first quake, state-broadcaster TRT said.
Turkey’s health minister, Fahrettin Koca, posted a video of a young girl in a navy blue jumper who was rescued. “Good news at the 150th hour rescued a little while ago by crews. There is always hope!” he tweeted.
Turkey’s Justice Ministry on Saturday announced the planned establishment of Earthquake Crimes Investigation bureaus. The bureaus would aim to identify contractors and others responsible for building works, gather evidence, instruct experts including architects, geologists and engineers, and check building permits and occupation permits.
A building contractor was detained by authorities on Friday at Istanbul airport before he could board a flight out of the country. He built a luxury 12-story building called Ronesans Rezidans in the historic city of Antakya, in Hatay province. When it went down, it left an untold number of dead. He was formally arrested Saturday.
Turkish justice officials targeted more than 130 people allegedly involved in shoddy and illegal construction methods as rescuers extricated more survivors, including a pregnant woman and two small children, six days after a pair of earthquakes collapsed thousands of buildings.
Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said Sunday that some 131 people were under investigation for their alleged responsibility in the construction of buildings that failed to withstand the quakes. While the quakes were powerful, victims, experts and people across Turkey are blaming faulty construction for multiplying the devastation.
Turkey’s construction codes meet current earthquake-engineering standards, at least on paper, but they are too rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings toppled over or pancaked down onto the people inside.
Among those facing scrutiny were two more people who were arrested in Gaziantep province on suspicion of having cut down columns to make extra room in a building that collapsed in the quakes, the state-run Anadolu Agency said.
The justice ministry said three people in all were under arrest pending trial, seven were detained and another seven were barred from leaving Turkey.
Authorities at Istanbul Airport on Sunday detained two contractors held responsible for the destruction of several buildings in Adiyaman, the private DHA news agency and other media reported. The pair were reportedly on their way to Georgia.
A large makeshift graveyard was under construction in Antakya’s outskirts on Saturday.
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths, visiting the Turkish-Syrian border Sunday, said in a statement that Syrians have been left “looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned,” he said, adding, “My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can.”
The first U.N convoy to reach northwest Syria from Turkey was on Thursday, three days after the earthquake. Erdogan acknowledged earlier in the week that the initial response has been hampered by the extensive damage. He said the worst-affected area was 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter and was home to 13.5 million people in Turkey. During a tour of quake-damaged cities Saturday, Erdogan said a disaster of this scope was rare, referring to it as the “disaster of the century” in multiple speeches
