Five people hugged each other as their apartment building collapsed on Monday, crushing them to death in central Turkey, the Anatolia news agency reported on Thursday. Relief workers struggled to separate their bodies to be able to pull them out of the debris of the building. At least 38 people died in the collapse.
As hopes dimmed to find more survivors, rescue workers pulled out the bodies of 11 people overnight, increasing the death toll to 38. Among the dead were a woman who was in the ninth month of her pregnancy and a little girl, thought to be two years old.
Thirty-one survivors were evacuated from the wreckage in the hours after the Monday collapse. Between 40 to 100 people were feared trapped in the debris.
”I don’t want to say that we’re expecting a miracle to find a survivor but if people believe in miracles, there is always hope,” Murat Salim Seren, a relief worker, told private CNN-Turk television.
Relief workers on Thursday were trying to pull out the bodies of the five people out of narrow tunnels dug into the pancaked building. It was not clear if the five were members of the same family.
Police probing negligence in the collapse of the 11-storey apartment building detained two building contractors on Wednesday for questioning. Angry relatives of the dozens still missing in the debris demanded justice for the contractors they said were responsible for the building’s collapse.
Police detained two of the building’s contractors and a team of prosecutors and engineers was probing the possibility of negligence in the building’s construction, Konya chief prosecutor Zafer Sipahi told reporters. It wasn’t clear what charges, if any, they could face.
Police chief Salih Tuzcu said authorities suspected deficient building materials may have led to the building’s sudden collapse.
Shoddy construction was blamed for many of the 17 000 deaths in a 1999 earthquake but few of the contractors faced legal action after the earthquake.
With temperatures near freezing, rescuers used cranes and bulldozers to sift through the debris on Wednesday. They stopped at one point to use sensitive listening devices and let sniffer dogs walk through the wreckage, but they found no signs of life. The last survivor was pulled out on Tuesday evening.
Seren, however, said the temperatures inside the debris were unexpectedly warm and that someone might have survived the cold weather.
Grieving relatives lashed out at the contractors who built the apartment house, which was only five years old and was considered upscale in Konya.
About 140 people lived in the building’s 37 apartments, officials said, but it was unclear how many people were inside at the time.
Officials said at least 18 residents were not in the building, but others may have had visitors at the time.
Many families had been celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Adha with friends and relatives when the building collapsed. — Sapa-AP