Earthquake in Turkey and Syria: the death toll rises to 35 thousand and they warn that there are still tens of thousands of bodies in the rubble

At least 31,643 people died and another 80,000 were injured in the earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 that devastated southeastern Turkey on Monday, and also caused a minimum of 3,575 deaths in Syria.

The new data, provided by the Turkish emergency agency, AFAD, comes when Even today the victims are found alive in the rubble. of the thousands of buildings collapsed in the ten provinces most affected by the earthquake.

Several people were rescued alive this morning. A 40-year-old woman could be 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. A minor was also found alive, according to the TRT station.

However, some experts warn about it there may be as many as 155,000 bodies still under the rubble of the thousands of collapsed buildings. For this reason they asked that attention be paid to the removal of the rubble, both for the possibility that there were survivors, and so as not to damage the bodies of the victims.

“Why remove the remains so soon? You can still be alive up to ten days later,” warned Ahmet Ovgun Ercan, a prestigious geophysicist at Istanbul Technical University, on Twitter.

This expert underlined that, after this period, victims can no longer scream or barely move, making it harder to tell they are alive to rescue teams. Ercan said the rush to remove building remains was a major mistake in the 1999 earthquake near Istanbul, which killed an estimated 18,000 people.

Turkish authorities said some 158,000 people had been evacuated to other provinces.

In Syria, both the government and the White Helmets rescue organization have stopped updating their death tolls regularly.

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, the last bastion of the Syrian opposition, and which ensures that only in its own areas there were more casualties than reported by the White Helmets for all rebel areas.

Construction boom and controversy over the quality of housing

Non-compliance with building regulations and subsequent amnesties granted by the Government to buildings constructed without a permit explain the huge number of casualtiesaccording to a complaint from the College of Architects of Turkey.

“The main reason for this huge tragedy is permit granted to buildings constructed without complying with building codes“, denounced Emin Koramaz, president of the Union of Chambers of Architects and Engineers of Turkey (TMMOB), to the EFE agency.

Koramaz assures that during the 20 years that the AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been in government, there have been eight important legalizations of “dangerous, rotten and illegal” buildings. and which had been built and inhabited without the corresponding licenses.

Several Turkish media recall that during the campaign for the 2018 presidential elections, last Monday Erdogan toured the areas most affected by the earthquakes announcing that the housing problems of hundreds of thousands of citizens had been solved thanks to what he called “the construction of peace”.

“We have solved the problem of 205,000 citizens of Hatay with the peace of construction. We are solving a very important problem of our citizens in Gaziantep, as in the rest of our country, with the peace of reconstruction,” announced during the 2018 election campaign the president, who aspires to re-election on 14 May