‘We know who the murderers of our children are’

Mehmet Tulek, whose daughter Asya was one of the 24 Cypriot children who were killed when the Isias hotel in the southeastern Turkish city of Adiyaman collapsed during last year’s earthquakes, on Sunday expressed fears over the ongoing court case regarding the hotel’s collapse.

“We known who the murderers of our children are, we saw the murder and we proved what happened through reports prepared by experts and presented them in court. However, the murderers and their mercenaries are trying to mislead the court, and I think they are succeeding,” he said.

He went on to describe the search for his daughter’s body in the rubble of the hotel, speaking of how he could see the poor workmanship and cut corners in the building’s construction while he was there.

“I saw everything with my own eyes for a week. I saw supporting columns I could break with my own hands, the welded iron bars without ribs, the stirrup distances which were many times higher than normal, the gravel from a river I was struggling to pick up.

“I also saw the giant reinforced concrete roof of the illegal floor, which was standing on the rubble, which by that point had become a pile of sand,” he said.

He pointed out the expert reports into the building which had been prepared, but said that despite the evidence, the defendants in the case are “now trying to mislead the court”.

“What did the murderers do? First, they hired an army of paid lawyers. Of course, these people had the character to prepare and implement false scenarios which they believed would exonerate them,” he said.

He added that the hotel’s owner Ahmet Bozkurt had made “false statements in court”.

“We also saw his lying son who said he had no connection with the hotel despite welcoming our children and their teachers at the door and saying he owned the place,” he said.

Additionally, he touched on the matter of a controversial report into the hotel prepared by Ankara’s Gazi University, which was much less scathing than the other reports prepared by other universities.

“That report begins with the collapse of the building as a result of two earthquakes and states that the illegal floor and the illegal lift had no impact on the collapse. It took me three days to reach my daughter because of the giant concrete roof on the illegal floor, which they removed without bothering to analyse and said it had no impact on the collapse.

“Did they know this? Did they care?” he asked.

With this in mind, he said he is “beginning to lose hope” that the latest report being written would bring justice, saying that while four different tests of the concrete used in the building’s construction had shown it to be of low quality, samples taken from the basement, where the quality may be different, are still being taken into consideration.

He asked, “was it the basement of this building that collapsed or the other nine floors which collapsed on our children?”

He then spoke of his exhaustion at the case, with 20 months now having passed since the earthquake.

“Give them their punishment already, and I will mourn in m own way,” he said.

A total of 24 Cypriot children, 11 Cypriot adults, and 37 others were killed when the hotel collapsed on February 6 last year.

The trial of the 11 people who have been held responsible for the 72 deaths is set to resume on October 22.

All 11 people currently stand accused of “causing death by conscious negligence” at Adiyaman’s third high criminal court, and, if found guilty, could face a maximum of 22 and a half years in prison each.

However, the families of those killed have demanded that the 11 be charged with intentionally killing all 72 victims. Most recently, hundreds of people marched across northern Nicosia in April to demand that the charges be upgraded, while a similar protest had been held in Famagusta in November.

Proceedings have thus far been slow, with a total of four university reports having been written into the hotel’s collapse.

The first two were written by Trabzon’s Karadeniz Technical University and the Istanbul Technical University, and outlined how sand and gravel from a local river had been used in the hotel’s construction, and how supporting columns had been cut at the hotel, among numerous other deficiencies.

The third was the controversial Gazi University report, with the controversy generated by that report pushing the court to order that the Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir write a fourth report on the matter.

As such, new samples were taken from the wreckage around a month ago to be sent to Izmir.