Türkiye allows investigations against four state officials over hotel collapse during earthquake

The governor’s office of eastern Turkey’s Adıyaman province has approved investigations into four city officials over their role in the collapse of a hotel during two powerful earthquakes last year that killed 72 people, news website T24 reported.

The 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes that struck eleven provinces in southern and southeastern Turkey killed more than 53,000 people, injured hundreds of thousands or left them homeless, and left behind enormous devastation.

The collapse of the Isias Hotel in Adıyaman killed 39 people from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC), including 29 teenagers who had flown to Turkey to take part in a student volleyball tournament.

At the end of 2023, following an investigation, eleven people, including the hotel owners, were charged with “causing the death and injury of several people through conscious negligence.” Prosecutors and families of the victims say the tragedy could have been prevented if appropriate safety standards had been followed.

In January, the trial of the 11 defendants began in a criminal court in Adıyaman, which received widespread attention in the Turkish and international media due to the deaths of the KKTC volleyball players in the tragedy. It was the biggest single tragedy in the history of the KKTC, recognized only by Ankara.

Families who travelled to Adıyaman in January to watch the trial complained that the public officials who had authorised and approved the collapse of the defective hotel building were not involved in the investigation.

In Turkey, the investigation and prosecution of public officials for crimes committed in the course of their official duties is governed by a law that requires state authorities to grant permission to initiate proceedings, depending on the status of the person concerned. Prosecutors have no right to initiate an investigation without this permission, regardless of the amount or quality of evidence implicating a public official in a crime. They must first send the evidence suggesting a criminal investigation to the relevant administrative authority, which will then conduct a preliminary investigation of its own to decide whether to grant the prosecutor permission to initiate proceedings.

According to a decision of the Adıyaman Governor’s Office, investigations will be launched against four Adıyaman Municipality officials who signed the construction permit for the hotel.

These include a deputy mayor, a city planning director, a project approval officer and an office technician.

Human rights group calls for investigation of state officials

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the non-governmental organization Citizens Assembly, formerly known as Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, also condemned the lack of legal action against state officials for their role in the deaths of thousands of people in last year’s earthquakes.

In March, they released a statement calling the situation “deeply disturbing” and “unacceptable.”

Expert reports commissioned by prosecutors in the regions most affected by the earthquakes and seen by HRW blamed municipal officials and private developers and construction companies for defects in collapsed buildings in the southern province of Kahramanmaraş and elsewhere. The Citizens’ Assembly has asked state authorities to provide information on the number of cases in which permission was granted, as required by Turkish law, to open a criminal investigation against an official. The Citizens’ Assembly had received information that only three officials were granted permission to open an investigation, with authorities mostly failing to provide answers.

The addition of the four municipal officials in Adıyaman brings the number of officials under investigation for their role in the earthquake damage to seven.

The lack of investigations into public officials seriously hampers the proceedings in these cases, HRW and the Citizens’ Assembly said. The courts hearing the cases cannot fully understand how the accused developers managed to ignore existing building regulations to obtain permits, avoid thorough inspections and sell notoriously unsafe buildings to the public.

Turkey has a history of failing to ensure that private and public actors responsible for poor construction projects that collapsed in earthquakes are held accountable for their mistakes. In the context of the 1999 earthquake in the Marmara region of western Turkey, which killed over 17,000 people, the media reported on the very limited and slow trials against private and very few public officials accused of wrongdoing. In most cases, penalties were converted to fines or cases were dropped when they were time-barred.