The number of fatalities from the violent earthquake on February 6 in Turkey and Syria amounted to 35,225according to the latest official figures released this Monday.
The 7.8-magnitude quake killed 31,643 in southern Turkey, Afad, Turkey’s state disaster management agency, reported on Monday, while authorities counted 3,581 dead in Syria, where updates are more sporadic. As the UN warned on Sunday, the death toll could “double”.
The new data arrive when even today Victims are found alive in the rubble. of the thousands of buildings that collapsed in the ten provinces most affected by the earthquake. Several people were rescued alive this morning.
A 40-year-old woman has been found alive after 170 hours trapped in the remains of a house in the city of Gaziantep, while in Antakya, a man was found alive.
Given these rescues, some experts have asked that care be taken with the removal of rubble, both because of the possibility that there are survivors and so as not to damage the corpses of the victims.
Ahmet Ovgun Ercan, a prestigious geophysicist from Istanbul Technical University estimated that there may still be 155,000 corpses in the rubbleas stated on Twitter.
In Syriaboth the Government and the organization of rescuers white helmets, they have stopped updating their casualty balances assiduously. Other sources cite higher figures, such as the so-called Salvation Government, of the Islamist alliance Levant Liberation Agency, which controls a large part of the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, Syria’s last opposition bastion, and which ensures that in only their zones have registered more victims than the white helmets report for all the rebel areas.
The Turkish authorities have reported that some 158,000 people have been evacuated to other provinces.
Failure to comply with construction regulations and the successive amnesties granted by the Government to buildings erected without a license explain the enormous number of fatalitiesaccording to the complaint Turkish College of Architects. “The main reason for this enormous tragedy is the permission granted to buildings built without respecting construction regulations,” he denounced today. EFE Emin Koramaz, President of the Turkish Union of Chambers of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB).
Koramaz assures that during the 20 years that the AKP, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party, has been in government, there have been eight large legalizations of “unsafe, rotten and illegal” buildings and that they had been built and inhabited without the corresponding licenses
Several Turkish media recall today that during the campaign for the 2018 presidential elections, Erdogan toured the areas most affected by the 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes last Monday, announcing that the housing problems of hundreds of thousands had been resolved. of citizens thanks to what he called “construction peace”.
“We have solved the problem of 205,000 Hatay citizens with building peace. “We are solving a very important problem for our citizens in Gaziantep, as in the rest of our country, with reconstruction peace,” the president announced during the 2018 campaign, who is running for re-election on May 14.
(With information from AFP and EFE)
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Source-www.infobae.com