KONYA, Turkey (AP) – Rescue workers dug out five more bodies from the wreckage of a collapsed apartment building on Friday, raising the death toll to 53.
Hopes dimmed of finding more survivors five days after the disaster, though more than 45 people were believed trapped inside Friday. The collapse is blamed on shoddy construction.
“It is strongly estimated that there are no air pockets left inside the rubble to survive,” said Atilla Ozdemir, chief of Turkey’s civil defense. “We think, the people rushed to stairs and elevators in panic and we’re very close to that part.”
Twenty-eight survivors were evacuated from the rubble, the last one pulled out on Tuesday, the crisis center in Konya said Friday. Earlier, authorities put the number of injured at 31, but the crisis center said that number included three people who were injured while trying to rescue people trapped inside.
Most of the bodies discovered in the rubble were squeezed between the ceiling and floor of the rooms in which the victims had been when the building collapsed.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday vowed to punish those responsible for the tragedy.
The building was only five years old and considered upscale. Grieving relatives lashed out at the contractors who built it.
Osman Nuri Dulgerler, an official investigating the collapse, said Thursday that lack of controls during construction and poor materials were seen as initial reasons for the collapse.
Shoddy construction has been blamed for many of the deaths in the 1999 quakes in western Turkey that killed more than 18,000 people. Experts say little has been done to address the problem of poor construction in the country.
Some 140 people lived in the building’s 37 apartments, officials said, but it was unclear how many people were inside at the time. At least 25 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.
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