ISTANBUL (AP) – Rescuers pulled the bodies of a 23-year-old woman and a man believed to be her husband from under a collapsed apartment building in central Turkiye yesterday, state-run media said.
Three other people were rescued from the wreckage and were being treated in a hospital, Anadolu Agency reported.
The collapse comes amid renewed focus on building safety following the deaths of 78 people in a fire on Tuesday that ripped through a 12-storey hotel at a ski resort in northwestern Turkiye. Investigators are examining whether proper fire prevention measures were in place.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said yesterday that 79 people were registered as living in the four-storey apartment block in the city of Konya, some 260 kilometres south of the capital, Ankara. Earlier, Yerlikaya said the last two people remaining under the debris were Syrian nationals. He added that the cause of the building collapse was not immediately known. “If there is a fault, negligence or anything else, we will learn it together,” he told journalists.
TV images showed emergency workers sifting through a large pile of rubble yesterday morning following the collapse the previous evening. Anadolu Agency reported that four people linked to businesses operating on the building’s ground floor were detained as part of the investigation.
The second anniversary of an earthquake that hit southern Turkiye and north Syria, killing more than 59,000 people, is just two weeks away. The high death toll at the time was due in part to building safety regulations being ignored.
