On Sunday, Turkey promised to thoroughly investigate anyone suspected of being behind the collapse of buildings during the country's devastating earthquakes nearly a week earlier. Turkey has already ordered the detention of 113 suspects.
The collapse of some of the thousands of buildings that were leveled in the 10 provinces affected by the tremors early on Monday has been linked to 131 suspects, according to Vice President Fuat Oktay, who said this overnight.
Failing To Enforce Building Codes
"We will closely monitor this until the required legal process is complete, especially for buildings that sustained significant damage and buildings that resulted in fatalities and injuries." In order to look into fatalities and injuries, he claimed that the justice ministry had established bureaus in the provinces affected by the earthquake.
Murat Kurum, the environment minister, cited assessments of more than 170,000 buildings to claim that 24,921 buildings in the region had collapsed or sustained significant damage as a result of the earthquake. Six days after the disaster, which affected parts of Syria and Turkey, rescuers were still searching for survivors in the earthquake debris. The death toll has already surpassed 28,000 and is likely to increase.
The government of President Tayyip Erdogan has come under fire from opposition parties for allegedly failing to enforce building codes and misusing special taxes collected in the wake of the last significant earthquake in 1999 to strengthen buildings.
Building With Flaws
Erdogan has claimed that instead of confronting corruption in the opposition-controlled municipalities, the opposition merely spreads slander and lies to discredit the government and obstruct investment. Turkey dropped 47 positions, from 54 out of 174 countries in 2012 to 101 in the ten years leading up to 2022, on Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index.
According to the state-owned Anadolu news agency, state prosecutors in Adana ordered the detention of 62 people as part of an investigation into collapsed buildings, while in Diyarbakir, prosecutors sought the arrest of 33 people for the same reason.
According to the report, four people were detained in Osmaniye and eight in Sanliurfa in connection with the destruction of buildings that were thought to have flaws, such as columns being removed. According to Anadolu, police detained the developer of one residential complex that collapsed in Antakya at the Istanbul Airport as he was getting ready to fly to Montenegro on Friday evening. He was formally arrested on Saturday.
The upscale 12-story residential complex with 249 apartments was finished ten years ago. Information regarding the casualties in that building was unavailable. According to Anadolu, the arrested man told the court that his desire to travel to Montenegro had nothing to do with the reason the complex collapsed and that he did not know why it happened.
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