How Turkey protected the powerful from earthquake accountability

First, they found a picture of the apartment building online. The body gutted, reclining in a pile of its own rubble, looked like a fish left with nothing but meatless spines. They left for Antakya in a rush the following day.

On the second day, they walked through what remained of the ancient city. When they reached the site where the building had stood, Duygu İnegöllü, a lawyer from Izmir, and her family, began their watch over the pancaked body of scrap metal and concrete. 

Some volunteers came to help, but İnegöllü said that there was not enough space to get inside. The volunteers left without being able to intervene. İnegöllü and her family waited for what she calls the “big machines” to arrive. They never came. A few days later, they found the first body. 

The apartment building’s name was Ilgım Apartmanı. Inside were the aunt, her husband, and their two children, aged seven and one and a half years old. The building collapsed after being hit by the earthquakes on 6 February 2023. 

None of İnegöllü’s relatives survived. The building was only three years old. 

When İnegöllü tries to explain the exact location of the residential apartment building where her aunt’s family used to live in Antakya, she uses coordinates that belong to another time. 

“It was next to Atatürk Caddesi”, she said. Right where “there was a big Migros.” 

Among the old and crumbled landmarks she unearthed, only one piece of information still makes sense today: the apartment complex was in the Odabaşı neighbourhood.

These days, Odabaşı often comes up in conversations with people from Antakya, the capital district of the southern Hatay province. Situated north of the historical city centre, further up in that wide valley enclosed by steep inclines where the city’s settlements stretched, Odabaşı was a village turned into a municipality during Antakya’s expansion in the 1990s. 

Today the roads to reach Odabaşı are bumpy and full of debris; what remains is a dusty intersection of barren land and rubble inhabited only by collectors conquering steep piles of steel scraps and the slow metal arms of excavators.

Here, the dust from collapsed buildings rises into the air, drifting across the clear horizon, as it fills the mouth and stings the eyes. After the 7.7-7.8 magnitude earthquakes swept cities scattered across southeastern Turkey and northern Syria on 6 February 2023, Odabaşı became a talking point among locals to point out the abysmal demise of Antakya. The fact that the building of İnegöllü’s late relatives was in Odabaşı, one of the neighbourhoods that faced the most destruction, tells something about its collapse.

“The most responsible institution is the municipality. Because they didn't check anything, they gave licences in that area, which is a very risky area, because [...] it is just next to the river”, said İnegöllü.

The majority of the 11 provinces affected by the earthquake, as well as the municipality of Antakya, are strongholds of Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The Public Prosecutor’s Office launched a criminal investigation into the collapse of Ilgım Apartmanı in February 2023. But months later, it was decided that no one would be held responsible for the building’s collapse, and the case never reached trial.

On 10 February 2023, while İnegöllü was still watching over Ilgım Apartmanı’s debris, the ministry of justice sent a detailed letter to public prosecutors across the region, instructing them to expedite the investigations into the collapsed buildings. Prosecutors were ordered to gather the names of private individuals like surveyors, contractors, technical officers, and “other responsible persons”. 

In the days following the letter, public prosecutors' offices filed over three hundred arrest warrants for private individuals - mostly contractors, architects, and engineers. But in the letter, reviewed by TNA, there is nothing explicitly addressing how to investigate public officials. 

Across the eleven affected provinces, criminal investigations were initiated for negligence causing the death of at least 48,000 people - among them, Syrians under temporary protection and international protection applicants- in what is considered Turkey’s deadliest earthquake in the last 100 years. What happened afterward, is something this article attempts to piece together.

For a year, The New Arab (TNA) has followed the unfolding of criminal investigations to understand patterns of negligence and corruption in the construction of private residential buildings that showed poor seismic resistance during the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake. 

The following is the complex account pieced together from reports by lawyers, engineers, architects, family victims, employees of building inspection companies, and associations across the region. Sources’ information has been verified through documents from criminal investigations, with a particular focus on the provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep.

TNA’s investigation uncovers a pattern of impunity and irregularities in legal proceedings. Turkish authorities are largely failing to prosecute, and in some cases, even properly investigate, public officials and administrations for their responsibilities.

In most cases reviewed by TNA in which public officials were indicted, their dossiers were separated, and authorisation for prosecution remained indefinitely on hold, pending higher approval. Stalled proceedings apply only to low-ranking officials, while evidence indicates that no high-ranking public officials are under investigation.

Information on trials remains scattered, and local sources report procedural irregularities, such as faulty material sampling and flawed expert reports, leading to misleading verdicts and premature case closures.

Indictments from court cases, construction amnesties, as well as public municipal zoning plans, soil investigations and occupancy permits all point to the role that local and state public officials played in setting the stage for the disaster. 

While The New Arab was conducting its own independent investigation, in January 2024 Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Turkish NGO Citizens Assembly filed Freedom Of Information requests (FOIs) with Turkish authorities to understand how many applications to prosecute public officials had been submitted and approved. 

HRW reported that most public bodies had refrained from sharing any information. The evidence HRW collected on trials and criminal investigations in the city of Kahramanmaraş further corroborates the findings of this article.

From three to ten storeys on shaky grounds 

The Ilgım Apartmanı was three years old when it collapsed.

The prosecutor’s office opened the investigation on the building in February 2023.

But some time later, İnegöllü was informed of a problem with the Ilgım Apartmanı samples.

“They made some mistakes while they were collecting evidence because the material was not enough, you know, but at that point, our building [i.e. its remnants] was removed,” the Izmir lawyer told TNA, her voice cracking from the other side of the phone. 

İnegöllü said the expert report - which determines individual responsibilities for the collapse - was conducted with the limited material the prosecutor’s office had gathered, even if deemed insufficient. Based on this report, the case of Ilgım Apartmanı was considered without plaintiffs and therefore closed.

“The report says that no one is responsible. That the building collapsed just because the earthquake was big. But we do not accept it,” she said.

The power of the earthquakes, sometimes portrayed as unforeseeable, has been leveraged in cases as justification and cause of force majeure to clog criminal proceedings. 

But lawyers who spoke to TNA in Gaziantep argued that the earthquake could not be used in court as an excuse for the failure of building structures: according to 2021 risk reports for Hatay and Gaziantep reviewed by TNA, municipalities and governorates were aware of aseismic construction flaws.  

The New Arab contacted the provincial governorates and municipalities of Gaziantep and Hatay, asking why these alerts had been ignored. No response was received in time for publication. 

Authorities report that the earthquakes wrecked 5,885 buildings in the province of Hatay alone. The vast majority of destroyed buildings were built before 1999, the year a 7.4-magnitude earthquake killed thousands across Turkey. In its aftermath, in 2001, Turkey enacted stricter building inspection regulations. Of the 29,997 buildings that were inspected along these new rules in Hatay, only 98 collapsed. 

Civil engineers told The New Arab that around 50 of these 98 buildings can be found in the Odabaşı neighbourhood. 

For many, it’s no coincidence.

Like many other urban settlements in Antakya that developed around the Asi-Orontes River, the ground beneath Odabaşı consists of slope debris. 

Seismologists have noted in various ground studies of the city the risks associated with developing urban areas over an alluvial valley enriched by long cliffs and riversides - a type of soil that fault movements cause to swell in volume or behave like liquid.

A lawyer we met in an open area surrounded by cranes and buildings under construction, where rows of numbered containers housed an organised group of busy attorneys from Antakya, reported that construction permissions in Odabaşı were set at three to four floors high 10-12 years ago. 

A few years later, contractors were granted permits for eight to ten-storey buildings, they said. Ilgım Apartmanı was ten storeys high.

“The question that the municipality must answer is, when the permission switched from three-four floors to eight-ten, why no one conducted soil investigations?” asked the lawyer, who requested to remain anonymous. 

When we directed the same question to the AKP-controlled Antakya municipality, no one was available to comment.

İnegöllü and her family requested a second expert report, but they admitted feeling hopeless.

Tefrik: untouchable public officials 

İlke Apartmanı was located in Antakya’s Güzelburç neighbourhood (which had been a municipality until 2012), in an area part of Turkey’s most dangerous earthquake zone. 

A few days after its collapse, the prosecutor’s office started an investigation into the building’s collapse. 

The indictment begins with a list of the victims’ names. There is a section for the deceased; this list is two pages long. There are 49 names. 11 people were still missing.

The ground of the nine-storey-high İlke Apartmanı was alluvial and situated in a streambed.  

The building licence and occupancy permit certificates bear the signatures of public officials from the Güzelburç and Antakya municipalities.  

The expert report concludes that the building did not sufficiently comply with the regulations on buildings constructed in earthquake zones, while identifying the contractors and other workers "all guilty of causing death by negligence".

The Güzelburç mayor and the Zoning and Urbanisation Deputy Director were also found to be “collaterally at fault” in the expert report. Therefore, the prosecutor’s office added a note at the end of the indictment, mandating the “separation” (tefrik in Turkish) of their dossier to request permission to investigate them as public officials. The prosecutor's office recorded them in a separate file with investigation number 2023/3XXX2.

TNA asked a lawyer in Antakya to check the system for dossier 2023/3XXX2. At the time of the interview in March 2024, he said the dossier was empty, as the request to investigate public officials was still pending. 

Ergin Sözen, a lawyer in Gaziantep and General Board Member of the Contemporary Lawyers Association (Çağdaş Hukukçular Derneği, ÇHD), mumbles as he reads the indictment from the İlke Apartmanı case. He follows several cases of collapsed buildings and, through the ÇHD network, receives updates on cases from all the affected provinces. 

TNA showed him a document from the İlke Apartmanı case. While he did not know about this case, he pointed at the notes on Law 4483, which regulates the trials and convictions of public officials. “This [tefrik] is exactly what is happening in our [İslahiye] case as well,” explained Sözen.  

He was referring to one of his cases, the Gözde Apartmanı in İslahiye, Gaziantep province. 

Slow proceedings or ill intent?

The engineer who prepared the soil investigation (zemin etüdü) report of Gözde Apartmanı is currently under trial . 

The report, dated August 2000, noted that the ground composition beneath Gözde Apartmanı presented several issues, including water at a depth of two-four metres and a risk of ground liquefaction. 

The engineer stressed that the foundations of the building should be chosen carefully and recommended constructing a deep foundation.

The case file found that the rules for building in disaster areas and the Zoning Law were not properly adhered to during the design, construction, and completion of the project.

When the earthquakes struck, 25 people died in the building.

Lawyers noted that, when the soil investigation report was submitted to the municipality, two years had already passed since the beginning of the building’s construction. 

Sözen confirmed that the construction date written on the case file is 1998, which is also the same date stated in the contractor’s statement examined by The New Arab.

“Normally, [the soil investigation report] should be taken first”, the Gaziantep-based lawyer told TNA, “so the municipality allowed it to be built illegally.”

According to Sözen, the engineer should not even be on the stand.  “[The engineer] said: ‘Don't build a house here’, and they are being tried in court, but there are no official representatives of the municipality [under trial]”, said the ÇHD member.

The Gözde Apartmanı is however one of the rare cases in which the permission to investigate the municipality’s technical affairs manager was granted under law 4483. 

Law 4483 requires prosecutors to seek approval from higher authorities before pursuing a criminal investigation into public officials for events pertaining to their performance of duty. Permission can be requested from provincial and district governors, but also from ministers or even the president, depending on the rank of the suspect.

But the İslahiye district governorate could not supposedly identify all the municipality employees in charge of the work. Only two municipal officials who signed the building permit could be identified, one of whom is deceased, and therefore no legal action could be taken against him. 

The district governor authorised the investigation of the municipality’s technical affairs manager in August 2023. More than a year has passed, but lawyers following the case report that there has been no progress on the investigation file. As of today, no public servant is under trial in the Gözde Apartmanı’s case. 

Authorities were well aware that the Nurdağı and İslahiye districts, both located in the Gaziantep province, as well as much of the Antakya district in Hatay, were high-risk areas due to their ground condition, as detailed in the provincial governorates’ risk reports reviewed by TNA.

The expert report of Gözde Apartmanı found municipal officials responsible, indicating that they should stand trial. But the prosecutor's office decided to separate the cases: one concerning public officials, still at the investigation stage, and another involving private individuals, currently on trial. 

However, Law 4483 does not prescribe the separation of cases, according to lawyers who spoke to TNA. 

“This distinction is entirely within the prosecutor's authority and discretion. Normally, yes, a legal justification for this should be necessary but the same procedure was carried out in Hatay, Adana, and other places [without justifying it]”, said Sözen.

He explained that “this is standard procedure, but it can take one month or forever.” 

The New Arab contacted the İslahiye Chief Prosecutor’s Office, seeking clarification on the stalled investigation of public officials. We also asked what the justification for the separation of cases was, but received no response in time for publication. 

When TNA inquired about the status of the Gözde Apartmanı trial, Sözen replied that the judge was expediting the process. In his opinion, the judge was aiming to finalise the verdict on private individuals before the investigation into public officials could reach an indictment. “[The judge] does not want files to be connected,” said Sözen. But lawyers working on the case demand that the files be merged. 

“Our requests to merge the investigation file of public officials with the case file have been rejected again,” stated Bermal Kutlu Şahin, another lawyer working on the Gözde Apartmanı case, in a written update sent to TNA in October 2024. 

Having two separate cases can lead to complications: one trial might conclude before others even begin, deterring the judge from assigning legal responsibility in a case where responsibility has already been attributed. 

For interviewed lawyers, it’s not only about the missteps of a slow judicial system. “We believe there is ill intent there. Because if it were just a single example, okay, but the situation is the same everywhere across all earthquake-affected regions,” said Sözen. 

The New Arab reviewed a dozen files from investigations into collapsed buildings in the Hatay and Gaziantep provinces, observing this recurrent separation of cases. Public officials are named in expert reports and indictments, but almost all legal proceedings are still pending approval. 

TNA contacted the Turkish ministry of justice, asking whether there was any “ill intent” in the systematic separation of cases. We received no response in time for publication.

The New Arab and experts interviewed for this investigation have only seen few low-ranking public officials being indicted in the reviewed legal documents. 

“Until now the state didn't give any permission for [the investigation of] high-ranking officials. The maximum is mayor of municipalities”, said Sözen. He was referring to the case of Ökkeş Kavak, the former mayor of Nurdağı, and the only mayor currently under trial that The New Arab and its sources are aware of. But the Gaziantep-based lawyer clarified that Kavak is being investigated for his role as a contractor, not as mayor.

Turning a blind eye

We interviewed Sözen in his bright office on a car-crowded street in Gaziantep, in a building with faded paint and visible cracks.

“Have you noticed the cracks?”, lawyer Bermal Kutlu Şahin asked us, pointing to the outside of the building. Our translator from Antakya turned pale: his mother had nearly died in one of these buildings on February 6. Later, as we exited the office elevator in uneasy silence, he suggested that we find another location to continue our interviews.

Several factors make for a solid building when it comes to seismicity: ground conditions, the architectural form, the load-carrier system, compliance with the latest regulations, high-quality materials, and construction techniques. 

But even if the materials are good, the soil investigation is thorough, and the project planning is solid, a neglected detail such as poor workmanship can cause the structure to crumble. 

Many believe that authorities and municipalities should be held accountable for their regulatory and licensing duties.

Emir Şahin, a technician at a building inspection company in Gaziantep, explained to TNA that much depends on the location of the building site. 

“I have had fewer problems in the [city] centre of Gaziantep, but more problems in the districts”, said Şahin. 

In Nizip district, while inspecting a building site, he noticed a newly completed construction nearby. There, a balcony had been built on the ground floor, an unapproved addition to the original building plan.  He asked the contractor on site how such an addition to the building nearby had been allowed. The contractor simply replied that they were planning to do exactly the same after his inspection. 

Şahin reported that threats against building inspectors - including death threats - were common and municipalities were sometimes turning a blind eye.

“So what should happen is [the municipality] needs to go and check it [i.e. the building] out regularly. They should come and destroy the balcony, fine the contractor, take [their] licence, and don’t let [them] build anything else. The municipality has the power to do all this,” he said. 

While municipalities are responsible for developing and enforcing zoning plans based on ground studies and other risk factors, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change is responsible for overseeing the enforcement of national regulatory standards on municipal zoning plans. 

In the risk reports from 2021, the Gaziantep governorate acknowledged inappropriate zoning practices, such as high-density plans, an “inability” to prevent unplanned urbanisation, and “inadequate control of structure during construction”. 

“All public officials who have opened up to construction in these areas are responsible. I'm not just talking about the AKP era [2002 onwards]. I'm also including the previous governments, from the 90s to today”, said Sözen.

The ÇHD lawyers questioned the Gaziantep governorate regarding the measures taken in response to the 2021 risk report. Provincial officials responded that they had created an action plan. In their reply, reviewed by TNA, they provided a few examples, mostly consisting of non-structural interventions, which ÇHD lawyers believe fall short of their responsibility to adopt precautions. 

These are some of the measures announced in the action plan: drafting a document for “awareness training on construction work” for contractors, iron-mould masters, and subcontractors (which was sent to Gaziantep’s Chamber of Civil Engineers); implementing non-structural measures (e.g. securing/immobilising furniture) to reduce damages in schools and student housing across nine districts; distributing brochures and spot videos on “awareness [...] regarding emergency gathering points”. 

Construction amnesties

Sözen is not the only one who believes high-ranking officials should be investigated.

In a small garden of improvised containers, next to a now crumbling building of the Chamber of Civil Engineers (TMMOB) Hatay Branch in Antakya, engineers showed us a page from an old issue of the BirGün newspaper. 

The headline reads: “Horrible earthquake scenario in Hatay”, with the article warning that “35-40 thousand people may die.” 

The newspaper covers a workshop conducted as part of the Seramar Study, a pilot project in which universities, professional associations, and local governments surveyed the vulnerability of the building stock in anticipation of an earthquake.

The ground studies carried out in Antakya reported that 12,000 to 13,000 buildings were at risk. The newspaper article was published on 9 November 2011.

“We predicted it, but nobody paid attention”, İnal Büyükaşık, head of the TMMOB Hatay Branch, said repeatedly throughout our meetings.

In what is left of the TMMOB Hatay Branch, members still sleep in containers set up in the fenced garden. By day, they work and meet in other containers. 

Most of these spaces look alike: a couple of desks, a cabinet, some colourful banners hanging on the walls, chairs. On weekends, the engineers return to their families, also living in containers.

According to local sources and reports reviewed by TNA, authorities continued to issue building licences for substandard projects, while orchestrating construction amnesties (imar affı). Engineers at TMMOB explained to TNA the underestimated impact of amnesties on the destruction. 

Turkish governments have been resorting to amnesties as early as 1948, to legalise illegal buildings and settlements. The ministry of environment and urbanisation manages amnesties, with local authorities providing on the ground support and technical expertise . 

With regards to the unaccountability of high-ranking officials, Eng. Büyükaşık noted that, while engineers, architects and contractors have been detained even before their official indictment, no one is in custody for the construction pardons.

There is significant economic gain from construction amnesties. One of these, for example, yielded approximately 17 billion Turkish liras (TL) ($3.77 bn) to the state coffers in fees from homeowners between 2018 and 2019. 

Amnesties also serve to build political consensus, by being often introduced just before local elections. A power that is conveyed by the government’s choice of terminology: on the ministry’s official page, pardons are referred to as “imar barışı” — literally “construction peace” or “reconciliation”, a subtle play on words. 

The consequences of condoning substandard constructions became evident after the 7.4-magnitude Marmara earthquake in 1999, the most recent and devastating seismic disaster in collective Turkish memory before 2023.

The Turkish parliament launched a research commission ten days after the disaster. They prepared a list of 38 recommendations, which were submitted to the presidency of the parliament on 23 December 1999.

One of the recommendations addressed construction amnesties: “the zoning amnesty policy, which encourages slums and illegal construction, must be abandoned.” Since then, eight zoning amnesties have been issued .

TNA contacted the ministry of environment and urbanisation, asking why these recommendations had been disregarded. We received no response in time for publication.

Associations like TMMOB have attempted to understand the impact of construction amnesties on the 2023 disaster, but investigating the issue has become difficult, mostly because of the unavailability of data and irregularities in the investigation by authorities. 

For example, although the Director General of Criminal Affairs of the Ministry of Justice recommended collecting samples from all collapsed buildings, sampling in Nurdağı and İslahiye was conducted only on structures that had a contractor, according to field reports compiled by ÇHD, the lawyers’ association. This excluded self-built buildings that had likely benefited from construction amnesties.

Destroying evidence?

Public officials were able to evade accountability thanks to a series of irregularities.

When lawyer Duygu İnegöllü was guarding day and night over the dead corpse of Ilgım Apartmanı in Antakya, a group of more than 30 lawyers from the Turkish Bar Associations across the country and ÇHD members were collecting evidence in Nurdağı. 

They noticed a small bulldozer tearing down the cracked but still-standing building of Nurdağı’s municipality. The ÇHD lawyers recorded a video of the machine demolishing the building. According to them, the incident occurred on February 14, eight days after the earthquakes. TNA was able to verify that the video was taken on February 14 or earlier.

The fact that the building was being demolished alarmed the lawyers. After all, not much time had passed since the disaster: investigations had just begun and people were still being pulled from the rubble.  

“It raised doubts for us,” said Sözen. He explained that documents could have been destroyed during the process. When the lawyers tried to approach authorities with questions, they were reportedly rebuffed.

“It may also be that the Nurdağı documents were recovered, but we can only find out about that if any documents about the municipality emerge in another case,” said Sözen.

On 28 May 2024, pro-opposition newspaper Duvar reported that the criminal investigation and trials in Nurdağı were obstructed by the loss of documents during the demolition of the building. TNA confronted the Nurdağı municipality about the alleged destruction of evidence, but we received no reply in time for publication.

Losing hope

With slow and apparently arbitrary legal procedures, the perceived unfairness of the judicial system has made people hopeless about compensation.

According to lawyers, survivors and victims of the earthquake are already giving up. Many victims had already decided in the aftermath of the disaster that it wasn’t worth filing complaints about collapsed buildings to prosecutors. A lack of faith in the system, lawyers agree, but also the immense loss of life and property in the region has taken its toll on families.

“We distributed [ready-made] petitions to them because there was no electricity, no computers”, recalled Sözen, “we asked them to file criminal complaints, but the citizens in İslahiye and Nurdağı were afraid, they were hesitant.” 

Today, new pressing issues are emerging in the daily lives of victims and their families. Sözen believes that, if new court cases arise in Hatay, they will likely involve disputes over demolished buildings and suspended property rights; especially in residential areas that were recently converted into “reserve areas for urban transformation”. The government is already expropriating ancestral lands and families are being reportedly displaced from their homes under the pretext of building new “earthquake-proof” neighbourhoods, citing law 6306.

Somehow lawyers already knew that many families would not seek justice. In the 2020 Elazığ (Xarpêt in Kurdish) earthquake (Mw 6.8), compensation cases were finalised only this year for the first degree court. Even for the 1999 Marmara earthquake, many cases weren’t closed for more than a decade and some of them were statute-barred. 

Before being able to obtain compensation, families have to wait for criminal cases to conclude, but according to lawyer Bermal Kutlu Şahin, it can take many years for a criminal case to come to an end in Turkey. 

“If one party is not satisfied with the result of the criminal case, they take it to the higher courts. Cases that go to the higher courts can take nearly five years”, she clarified.

History risks repeating itself. 

As time passes, victims are less likely to receive fair compensation. A yearly flat increase is applied to payouts to keep up with inflation, but this varies depending on the type of claim. In a country where inflation has remained at least above 50% since 2022, according to disputed official figures, the 24% interest rate for regular compensation claims is often not enough to support families and cover the costs of legal proceedings. 

“Considering the cost of living and inflation in Turkey, these amounts are laughably small”, wrote Kutlu Şahin in a message sent to TNA. 

“Right now, if you file a lawsuit for anything in Turkey, you need to spend at least 5,000 TL ($150). People spend 10,000 TL ($300) for a 50,000 TL ($1500) case. That’s why most people don’t want to go to court”, she added. An onerous amount considering average household net monthly income amounted to 15,100 TL in Turkey in 2023 ($655).

Without the prosecution of public officials and with cases being closed without merging files, victims and their families face prospects of meagre compensation and a bitter sense of incomplete justice. 

Private individuals under trial like contractors are usually connected to more than one case of collapsed buildings, so their ability to disburse a fair amount to all victims is very limited. 

“The contractors have lost everything. It is difficult to collect money from them, but if state responsibility is established, it is easier to collect money from the state”, said the anonymous lawyer from Antakya.

***

In the chaos of roads that no longer exist in Antakya’s Odabaşı neighbourhood, we stop our car on the side of a busy street. Frantically crossing two lanes, we arrive at a deck overlooking a riverside and a hollow green field. 

“This is the apartment of my mother", our translator says, showing us a picture of one of the collapsed buildings, which he took in the morning of the earthquakes. Another thing that no longer exists here. 

Cellphones in Antakya are filled with pictures and videos of cracked walls, broken beams, snapped steel, and piles of rubble. People were told to take as many photos and videos as possible, as these images could become evidence in court. But our translator does not plan to use them in a tribunal. He decided long ago not to file a complaint about the building with the prosecutor's office.

“The building fell apart like playing cards”, he says, “there were 48 flats, and only seven people survived.” His mother was one of the lucky ones who didn’t lose an organ or a limb, he adds. 

We ask if he knows whether people have filed complaints and why they haven’t. 

“To where? For what?”, he replies. We are silenced. 

We cross the two-lane road and get back into the car. The empty green field disappears behind us and we drive away towards hills of rubble and no apparent direction, fending through the dusty air of what remains of Antakya, as we cruise past the endless perimeters of the same old, new construction projects of the city.

The production of this investigation is supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund. The International Press Institute (IPI), the European Journalism Centre (EJC) and any other partners in the IJ4EU fund are not responsible for the content published and any use made out of it.

Photographer: Federico Ambrosini

Additional reporting support: Yağız Alp Tekin

Editing and fact-checking:

(The New Arab):  Investigative Researcher/Journalist Anas Ambri and Investigative Editor Andrea Glioti

Additional fact-checking and translation support: Aylin Elçi

For questions, comments and complaints please email Andrea Glioti andrea.glioti@newarab.com or Anas Ambri anas.ambri@newarab.com.

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