Earthquake hotel trial ‘has turned into a murder case’

The trial of the 11 people held responsible for the deaths of 24 Cypriot children, 11 Cypriot adults, and 37 others when the hotel in which they were staying collapsed “has turned into a murder case” following the submission of a new scientific report, the families of the 24 children said on Thursday night.

The Keeping the Champion Angels Alive Association – the “champion angels” being the moniker given to the 24 children, who had been part of the Famagusta TMK school volleyball team – declared that “the murderers will be held accountable” for the collapse of the Isias hotel in the southeastern Turkish city of Adiyaman during last year’s earthquakes.

“It has been documented again with this latest report that this massacre was not a natural disaster, it was the result of a chain of deliberate acts and crimes which disregarded human life,” the association said.

It added, “today, although we cannot bring back those we lost, we demand justice be served. This incident was a murder which happened right before our eyes, and those responsible must be held accountable.

“Dozens of safety issues which were ignored, precautions which were skipped for the sake of profit and a lust for money, and deliberate violations of the law are obvious. Every detail clearly stated in this latest expert report are parts of a chain of irresponsibility which cost the lives of our loved ones.”

It went on to say the crimes committed in the hotel’s construction “cannot be ignored in any way.”

“Even though we cannot bring our loved ones back, we demand that those responsible for these intentional acts be punished for the crime of causing death by intent, so that we can keep our loved ones’ memories alive. We want those responsible who are currently being tried without detention to be arrested and for the public officials who neglected their duties to be tried,” it said.

It concluded, “we will continue our fight until the end for justice to be served. We demand that those responsible be held accountable before the law, that these crimes be punished with the harshest penalties, and that all the necessary measures be taken to prevent similar disasters from happening again.”

The report, which was written by Izmir’s Dokuz Eylul University, said the building’s collapse “was not caused by the earthquake, but by construction and design errors.”

“If the building had been built in accordance with earthquake-related building regulations passed into law in 1998, it would not have collapsed,” it said.

The report also found the building had collapsed in a different direction to that which had been claimed by the 11 defendants in the ongoing trial over its collapse, and that this had happened “due to manufacturing errors and structural deficiencies”.

In addition, it found the “illegal floor” built on top of the hotel also had an impact on the building’s collapse.

The report also found that no ground survey was ever conducted with regard to the building.

As such, it found that the hotel’s owner Ahmet Bozkurt, architect Erdem Yildiz, and civil engineers Mehmet Goncuoglu and Hasan Aslan responsible for the building’s structural errors, and that fellow civil engineer Halil Bagci had prepared an “incomplete” static report in 2001 which also contributed to the hotel’s collapse.

The case’s prosecution lawyers had released a statement on Tuesday regarding the report, explaining that it had found that the forces exerted on the building did not exceed those foreseen by the 1998 building regulations.

Additionally, they said the mezzanine floor was “missing” from modelling done in safety reports regarding the hotel, and that as such, its impact was “ignored” when calculations were carried out.

Additionally, they said the mezzanine floor was “missing” from modelling done in safety reports regarding the hotel, and that as such, its impact was “ignored” when calculations were carried out.

This predicated the “soft storey irregularity” which had been referred to in the report prepared last year by Trabzon’s Karadeniz Technical University.

Soft storey irregularity means the higher floors were constructed more rigid than the lower floors. This meant that when the earthquake struck and the lower floors swayed, the higher floors collapsed more easily than they necessarily should have.

The trial of the 11 people held responsible for the hotel’s collapse is set to resume on December 3 after having been adjourned on October 22.