Nearly 200 people have been arrested for alleged poor building construction following the catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey earlier this month, Turkey’s Justice Ministry said, CNN reports.
About 50,000 people were killed across Turkey and Syria after the earthquake struck on February 6.
The ministry said that 626 people were “suspects” after buildings fully collapsed or were seriously damaged in the wake of the earthquakes. Some of the suspects died in the quake while police are still hunting for others.
On Saturday, Turkey’s Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said evidence had been collected at thousands of buildings.
More than 5,700 buildings in Turkey have collapsed, according to the country’s disaster agency, and questions have been asked about the integrity of structures in some areas of the affected regions.
“The thing that strikes mostly are the type of collapses – what we call the pancake collapse – which is the type of collapse that we engineers don’t like to see,” said Mustafa Erdik, a professor of earthquake engineering at Bogazici University in Istanbul. “In such collapses, it’s difficult – as you can see – and a very tragic to save lives. It makes the operation of the search and rescue teams very difficult.”
Erdik also told CNN the images of widespread destruction and debris indicates “that there are highly variable qualities of designs and construction.” He says the type of structural failures following an earthquake are usually partial collapses. “Total collapses are something you always try to avoid both in codes and the actual design,” he added.
