ISTANBUL (AP) — An apartment building collapsed in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sunday, killing one person and injuring eight, authorities said, rekindling concerns about the durability of buildings in the earthquake-prone city.
Television footage showed firefighters manually clearing rubble from the collapsed five-story building in Kucukcekmece on the city’s European side. Istanbul Governor Davut Gul, who visited the scene, said seven people were initially pulled from the rubble, two of them seriously injured.
Police later said one injured person had been rescued and a body had been found.
The 36-year-old building collapsed at 8:40 a.m. (5:40 a.m. GMT), the governor said. The cause was not immediately clear, but there were no signs of an explosion or earthquake. Only the top two floors were used as housing, while the rest of the building was occupied by businesses.
Footage from a camera across the street showed passengers waiting to board a public minibus narrowly escaping being hit by falling debris.
ISTANBUL, TURKEY – JUNE 2, 2024: Firefighters and a team from Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) conduct search and rescue operations among the rubble of a building that collapsed for unknown reasons in the Kucukcekmece district of Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo by Oguz Yeter/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Urbanization Minister Mehmet Ozaseki posted on social media platform X that the apartments had been built without complying with standards and that additional floors had been added later illegally.
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said two people had been detained: the building’s owner and the owner of a restaurant on the first floor.
He told reporters at the scene that the dead man was a Turkmen national, along with several others who lived in the building.
Last year, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck parts of southern Turkey and neighbouring Syria, killing more than 59,000 people, highlighting Turkey’s poor enforcement of building regulations.
Istanbul, with an official population of 16 million, lies close to the North Anatolian Fault line, where an earthquake in the south of the city killed at least 18,000 people in 1999. City officials say 200,000 buildings in its 3 million people are in urgent need of repairs.
At least 29 killed in fire at Istanbul nightclub during renovationshttps://t.co/Kv6z3DNxll
—Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 2, 2024
