February 25, 2023 – 8:55 PM
Turkish Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdag announced at a press conference in Diyarbakir that nearly two hundred people, most of them construction contractors, have been arrested in Turkey on suspicion of negligent work on buildings that collapsed due to the devastating earthquake that struck the southern part of the country. . According to the MTI report, the minister announced the initiation of court proceedings against more than 600 people due to the building collapse.
Okesh Kavak, mayor of Nordağı district in Gaziantep province, who is a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), was also produced. According to the Turkish Anadolu News Agency, he was accused of failing to inspect construction sites.
The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in power for more than twenty years, has come under fire for lax building standards that may have contributed to the deaths of more than 44,000 people in Turkey.
According to government data, more than 173,000 buildings were damaged in the February 6 earthquake, which destroyed 11 Turkish provinces, and in the aftershocks that followed the earthquake, nearly 10,000 people, and two million people were left without a roof.
In a separate article, we considered the example of the city of Erzin, located 70 kilometers from the epicenter in early February. small town Made it in the news, that the level of destruction there was much lower. No house in Erzin completely collapsed, and no deaths were reported, while the natural disaster wreaked havoc on nearby settlements. Erzin’s example shows that where the city administration has learned from the past and does not allow space for weak structures based on corruption, the damage is much less.
