Hope fades for boys trapped in Turkish quake rubble

Turkish rescue workers held out little hope yesterday of saving any of 15 small boys thought still buried in the earthquake rubble of a dormitory that experts said was a shoddily built death-trap.

The mood of national despair grew as the official death toll from Thursday's earthquake in the remote eastern province of Bingol rose to at least 151, 68 of them boys killed when the quake flattened their school dormitory.

The last surviving boy was pulled out of the rubble on Friday morning. Since then, rescuers using sensitive listening equipment and sniffer dogs have failed to find any signs of life.

While rescue teams insisted they had not abandoned hope of finding any more survivors, the use of heavy machinery yesterday to lift the wreckage indicated they no longer felt the need for extreme care.

As cranes and winches rumbled over the dormitory, Nebil Yenguner, part of a survey team sent by the independent Turkish Chamber of Engineers and Architects, told Reuters: "The placement of the building is wrong, the construction techniques are wrong, the concrete is extremely weak."

"It's what we've seen a hundred times," a grim-faced Yenguner said. "The plans don't match what was built in any way."

The building had been home to nearly 200 boys from poor outlying villages too small to have their own school.

The small wooden homes their parents built in their villages survived the quake, while the four-storey state-built dormitory proved too weak to ride the tremor.

"The pain in Bingol has clearly and openly put on the agenda our infrastructure problems, the mindset of stealing materials, corruption, lawlessness and injustice," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday.

He has promised that builders responsible for shoddy work will be prosecuted.

"If you ask me, it's clear there has been stealing from the materials here," said Ahmet Aydin, co-ordinating the rescue efforts at the dormitory.

Tales abound of contractors charging for steel rods of a certain width but using half that size and pocketing the difference. Sometimes sand for concrete is simply collected from the beach, complete with salt and shells.

The crisis management centre in Bingol, where violent protests broke out on Friday by locals demanding tents and food, said 68 bodies had been recovered from the dormitory, where 115 boys had been found alive.

Exact figures on the number of deaths have been hard to establish, adding to complaints that local government failed to co-ordinate with the rescue teams who rushed to the area.

Troops handed out tents to impatient crowds in Bingol yesterday. Residents pressed forward in crowds, keen to pitch their tents before another bitterly cold night set in. Turkish Red Crescent mobile kitchens were providing food.

"It's hard to expect to find more living but we are still working and we have not abandoned hope," said Aydin.

Many of those who survived owed their lives to metal bunk beds and lockers that sheltered them from falling masonry. The building was built with state money in the late 1990s.

Turkey is criss-crossed with earthquake fault lines, and a succession of tremors since the mid-1990s have all exposed corrupt building that needlessly increase the death toll.

In Italy, six people are being investigated over the deaths of 27 children and a teacher when a school collapsed in an earthquake in southern Italy last October.