TURKEY OFFICIALS DETAIN BUILDING CONTRACTORS

More than 100 taken into custody following quake

With anger swelling in Turkey on Saturday over the government’s slow response to Monday’s devastating earthquake and what critics say was shoddy construction, the government began detaining building contractors across the country whom it blamed for some of the collapses that have helped drive the death toll in the country above 24,000.

More than 100 people were detained across the 10 provinces affected by the quake, the state-run Anadolu News Agency reported on Saturday, as the Turkish Justice Ministry ordered officials in those provinces to set up “Earthquake Crimes Investigation Units.” It also directed them to appoint prosecutors to bring criminal charges against all the “constructors and those responsible” for the collapse of buildings that failed to meet existing codes, which had been put in place after a similar disaster in 1999.

The arrests were the first steps by the Turkish state toward identifying and punishing people who may have contributed to the deaths of their fellow citizens in the quake. Across the earthquake zone, residents expressed outrage at what they said were corrupt builders who cut corners to fatten their profits and the government’s granting of “amnesties” to builders who put up apartment complexes that failed to meet the new codes.

In the Saraykint neighborhood of Antakya, residents pointed to shoddy workmanship in a newly built luxury building of 14 floors, with some 90 apartments, that had collapsed.

“The concrete is like sand,” said one man who declined to give his name, standing near the building as he watched rescuers work. “It was built too quickly.”

Among those detained on Saturday was Mehmet Ertan Akay, builder of a collapsed complex in the hard-hit city of Gaziantep, who was charged with involuntary manslaughter and violation of public construction law, a Turkish news agency reported. The Gaziantep prosecutor’s office said it had issued the detention order after inspecting evidence collected from the rubble of the complex he had built.

Mehmet Yasar Coskun, builder of a 12-story, 250apartment building in Hatay province that was destroyed, was detained Friday at an Istanbul airport while trying to board a flight to Montenegro. Dozens of people are thought to have died when the building collapsed.

Two builders of a collapsed 14-story building in Adana, who reportedly fled Turkey immediately after the quake, were detained in Northern Cyprus, according to the Turkish-controlled Northern Cyprus administration.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, visiting Diyarbakir province on Saturday, defended the government’s actions, saying that this earthquake was “three times bigger and more destructive than the 1999 quake, the greatest disaster in our country’s recent memory.” While acknowledging that official response has been slow, he said that the country was not prepared for an earthquake of this size.

While Turkey has building codes put in place after the 1999 quake, residents said that they were often not applied because contractors can earn more money when they cut corners: mixing the concrete and using cheaper metal bars to gird pillars, among other things.