At least 31,643 people were killed and 80,000 injured in the earthquake that devastated southeastern Turkey last Monday, and at least 3,500 people were also killed in Syria.
The new figures, provided by Turkey’s emergency agency Afad, come as victims are still alive amid the rubble of thousands of buildings that collapsed in the ten provinces worst hit by the quake.
Several people were rescued alive on Monday morning. A 40-year-old woman was found alive after 170 hours in the city of Gaziantep, and a man was found alive in Antakya.
In light of these rescue efforts, some experts have asked for caution in removing the debris, both for the possibility of survivors and without damaging the bodies of the dead.
Ahmed Ovgun Ercan, a prestigious geophysicist at Istanbul Technical University, estimated on Twitter that there could be at least 155,000 bodies in the rubble.
In Syria, the government and the White Helmets rescue organization have stopped regularly updating the balance of casualties. Other sources indicate higher figures.
Turkish authorities said about 158,000 people had been evacuated to other provinces.
amnesty for buildings
According to a complaint by the Turkish College of Architects, non-compliance with building regulations and successive amnesties granted by the government to buildings built without a license explain the huge number of deaths.
“The main reason for this huge tragedy is the permitting of buildings that were built in compliance with building regulations,” Emin Koramaz, president of the Union of Turkish Chambers of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB), told EFE.
Koramaz claims that in the 20 years that the AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been in government, there have been eight major legalizations of “unsafe, rotten and illegal” buildings, and that they were built and inhabited without the appropriate. licenses.
Several Turkish media outlets recall that during the 2018 presidential election campaign, Erdogan toured the areas most affected by last Monday’s 7.8 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes and said that housing problems for hundreds of thousands of residents had been resolved. Under the name “Construction Peace”.
“We solved the problem of 205,000 citizens of Hatay by making peace.” We in Gaziantep, as well as in the rest of the country, are solving a very important problem for our citizens, with the peace of reconstruction,” said the president during the 2018 campaign, who will run for re-election on May 14.
Source: El Diario
