The contractor who built the dormitory building which disintegrated into dust during the Bingol earthquake, killing at least 66 children, was in hiding yesterday as grieving and angry relatives stepped up demands for him to be prosecuted.
Amid allegations of a construction mafia being operated by local politicians and builders in the eastern Turkish city, Seref Bozkus is facing accusations that he cut so many corners in the construction of the dormitory at Celtiksuyu, six miles outside Bingol, that there was no way it could have withstood Thursday’s quake, which struck at 3.30am.
The Observer has learnt that Bozkus is a relative of a prominent local politician, who is alleged by locals to be instrumental in the awarding of public building contracts. The politician, who on Friday was jeered by a crowd of 1,000 furious residents, is himself a builder and was responsible for the construction of another local school that collapsed on Thursday.
Bozkus is yet to break cover despite the fact that he lost his stepmother and grandfather in the earthquake when his family house – built by another contractor facing corruption allegations – collapsed.
Locals gathered at the Mazan mosque on a hill above Bingol yesterday to mourn his family members, but Bozkus was not among them. His main office in a glass-fronted building opposite Bingol’s central square remained locked tight, as did another office around the corner which is listed as his business address in the local telephone book.
‘He has gone,’ said a man waiting outside. ‘He knows that people are after him, so he has disappeared.’
Yesterday orange-suited workers continued to swarm over the dormitory rubble but the task had turned to recovery rather than rescue. Seventeen bodies were pulled out yesterday, and 13 remained somewhere between the four buckled layers of concrete which are all that remain of the five-year-old building. Nobody has been found alive since 7.30am on Friday.
Under the searing heat of the sun, the families of the missing boys continued their awful vigil beside the wreckage. Nineteen of Cemil Baylan’s nephews, all of secondary school age, were in the dormitory when the quake hit. Twelve had already been pulled out dead, the rest were still buried.
‘The builder should be prosecuted and if he is found guilty they should throw as much punishment at him as they can,’ said Baylan, from the village of Yigitbas.
Many of the farming villages around Bingol sent their sons to the boarding school because they could not afford schools or teachers of their own. All have suffered a heavy loss. In Garipkoy yesterday, for example, villagers were mourning the loss of nine of the 13 pupils it sent to the school.
The extent of Bozkus’s corner-cutting is now clear. A team from the Turkish chamber of civil engineering assessing the damage yesterday told The Observer that the dormitory was built of the lowest grade of concrete. Their preliminary examination revealed that the steelwork supporting the walls was of such poor quality that it should not have been used in a four-storey building anywhere, let alone one sitting on one of the planet’s most violent seismic fault lines. The engineers said Bozkus had not bothered to link the steelwork, rendering it redundant.
Nebil Yengoner, the team’s leader, said: ‘This man should be arrested, but you cannot blame him alone. A lot of people are involved. In Turkey we have strict rules on buildings but in practice they are not enforced. Too many builders get contracts by doffing their caps to the local rulers.’
Bozkus has become what some see as the symbol of a network of corruption that goes deeper than the incompetence of one contractor.
Pressure is growing on Recep Erdogan’s AKP government in Ankara to crack down on corrupt contractors and their political cronies. Milliyet , one of Turkey’s most popular daily newspapers, led on revelations of the semi-official kickback system that dominates public building contracts.
Abdullatif Cakir, who prosecuted the contractors responsible for the flawed buildings that crumpled in the Marmara earthquakes in 1999, said yesterday: ‘All this work runs on bribes. That’s why the buildings fall down.’
Around Bingol, the contrasting fate of new and older buildings was obvious. Along one side of the main road leading down the hill out of the city, workers were demolishing the remains of apartment block after apartment block, most of which were thrown up in the last 10 years to house the hundreds who fled to Bingol from the country to escape the fighting between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish army. The older blocks on the other side of the road survived virtually unscathed. – Guardian Unlimited Â