In Turkey, the builders of houses collapsed due to the earthquake began to plant

Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said recently that 184 suspects, including building contractors and property owners, have already been arrested. At the same time, according to him, investigations were launched against approximately 612 people.

For years, experts have warned that pervasive corruption and government policies mean that many of the new buildings being built in Turkey are unsafe.

The confirmed death toll in Turkey and Syria as a result of a catastrophic earthquake three weeks ago has now exceeded 50,000.

Among those in custody as part of the investigation are building contractors and building owners or managers, Bozdag said in television commentary from a coordination center in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, one of 10 provinces hit by the disaster. “The discovery of evidence in buildings continues as a basis for criminal investigations,” the minister added.

The comments of the head of the Turkish Ministry of Justice showed how much the investigation has expanded – two weeks ago, authorities said that 113 arrest warrants had been issued.

Bozdag said last week that legislative changes might be needed to deal with building permit offenses and said authorities should discuss tougher penalties and deterrents for violating zoning rules that dictate where and how buildings can be built. more safely.

Experts said that many of the destroyed structures were built using substandard materials and methods and often did not meet government standards.

According to the Turkish justice minister, among those formally arrested and taken into custody are 79 construction contractors, as well as 74 people who are legally responsible for buildings, 13 property owners and 18 people who made changes to buildings.

Among those arrested is the mayor of one of the cities located near the site of the tremors, Turkish media reported. Ekkesh Kavak, who heads the Nurdagi district in Gaziantep province and is a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), is said to have failed to carry out building inspections.

Earlier in February, it became known that the developer who built the residential complex of 249 apartments in which former Chelsea star Christian Atsu died was arrested. Mehmet Yasar Koskun was detained at the Istanbul airport due to suspicions in the construction of the building. The developer denied trying to flee the country and insisted he was only on his way to Montenegro, where he has other projects. Koskun is said to have stated in a leaked testimony that he did not know why the building could not withstand the two earthquakes that hit the region. The lawyer suggested that his client was the victim of a scapegoat search.

More than 160,000 buildings collapsed or were severely damaged in Turkey after the quakes, raising questions about whether the effects of the disaster were exacerbated by “human error”.

Opposition parties and some construction experts accuse President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration of failing to comply with building codes and trying to shift blame for the disaster. Critics argue that government policy allowed so-called “amnesties” for contractors who violated building codes to spur a building boom, including in earthquake-prone regions.

Erdogan has acknowledged the shortcomings but appears to have blamed fate on the scale of the disaster, the BBC notes.

“Things like this have always happened. This is part of the plan of fate,” the Turkish president said during a recent visit to the region.

At the same time, President Erdogan promised that the perpetrators would be brought to justice and promised to rebuild the houses and the southeast disaster area within a year.

Authorities have already begun work to rebuild homes for millions of people in need of relocation following the devastating aftershocks. The government on Friday announced that it had begun construction of 855 housing units in Gaziantep.

Nearly 2 million people left homeless by the disaster are housed in tents, container houses and other structures in the region and other parts of the country, Turkey’s disaster management agency AFAD said. More than 335,000 tents have been set up in the earthquake zone, and container houses are being set up in 130 communities, while nearly 530,000 people have been evacuated from the affected areas, it added.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said it estimated that the destruction left 1.5 million people homeless, with 500,000 new homes needed.

The initial plan is to build 200,000 apartments and 70,000 village houses at a cost of at least $15 billion. The bill to rebuild homes, power lines and infrastructure could be about $25 billion, Wall Street bank JPMorgan said in a report.

In another report by the TÜRKONFED business association, damage to housing construction is estimated at $70.8 billion.

As if in a bitter mockery of the state of modern buildings that took shape under the impact of an earthquake, burying unfortunate people among the ruins, there is information that the ancient city of Anazarbus, whose history goes back 7500 years, located in the Kazan region of the southern province of Adana, withstood recent earthquakes with center in Kahramanmarash with little damage. The walls of the fortress and ancient city structures, including the gates of the triumphal arch, received only small cracks and remained standing, in contrast to 11 destroyed and dozens of damaged buildings in the area, writes the Daily Sabah. One resident, Ziya Shimshek, who has lived in the region for a long time, said it was the third major earthquake in his lifetime and attributed the town’s survival to the quality of the ancient mortars used in its construction. “This structure is thousands of years old and remained intact during this earthquake,” he said.