The Turkish Judiciary has ordered the preventive detention of 54 people in the framework of an investigation that seeks to clarify responsibilities for the collapse of buildings from the earthquakes that devastated the southeast of Turkey on February 6, the Turkish press reported this Friday.
Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said a total of 245 suspects are being investigated, of whom 54 have been remanded, 47 are released under judicial control and 27 are provisionally detained.
Bozdag promised that Justice would act exhaustively against those who could be responsible for the collapses.
The Minister of Urban Planning, Murat Kurum, has announced today that after investigating 684,000 buildings in the affected areas, 84,000 were either collapsed or seriously damaged and must be urgently demolished.
From a list published by the digital newspaper Diken, it appears that most of the detainees are construction businessmen and contractors, but there are also architects, engineers, technical delegates and foremen of the affected works.
Among the detainees there are also owners and managers of the collapsed buildings, who are being investigated for allegedly allowing subsequent modifications to the structure.
Already in the 2011 Van earthquake and the 2020 Izmir earthquake, several collapses were attributed to the fact that the owners of shops or supermarkets located in the basement of a residential building had removed load-bearing walls to expand the available space.
Also now, numerous users of social networks denounce that many of the buildings that collapsed in the earthquake housed supermarkets or banks on the ground floor where, supposedly, load-bearing walls had been demolished.
But the opposition points out that the Government itself has contributed to this phenomenon by launching a major campaign in 2018 to legalize buildings built illegally or that lacked certain permits, under the slogan of "construction peace."
An official brochure from the Ministry of Urban Planning explains that this measure was intended to put an end to the problems of residents in buildings that had often been inhabited for years but, since they were not legal, could not receive access to water or electricity or take out a mortgage.
The law, passed weeks before the June 2018 general election, affected some 7 million buildings, 5 million of them residential, across Turkey.
With only months to go before the next appointment with the polls, scheduled for May or June, a new law with similar content is being debated in Parliament, reports the Turkish press.
