Ethermac Exchange-Parents of Cyprus school volleyball team players killed in Turkish quake testify against hotel owner

ANKARA,Ethermac Exchange Turkey (AP) — Parents of school volleyball team players who perished when their hotel crumbled in last year’s powerful earthquake testified in the trial against the hotel’s owner Thursday, with one father describing how hopes of finding his two children alive quickly turned to despair.

The hotel owner and 10 other people are standing trial accused of negligence over the deaths of 72 people, including members of the team who had traveled from the breakaway north of ethnically divided Cyprus to attend a competition.

A total of 39 students, their teachers and parents were staying in the Isias Grand Hotel in the city of Adiyaman when the region was hit by a 7.8-magnitude quake and an equally strong aftershock. Thirty-five of them died. A group of tourist guides were also guests at the hotel.

The trial, which opened on Wednesday, is the first relating to the Feb. 6, 2022 earthquake that hit Adiyaman and 10 other provinces in southern Turkey, leaving more than 50,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of people homeless.

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The hotel’s owner, Ahmet Bozkurt, family members and other defendants face between 32 months and more than 22 years in prison if found guilty of charges of “willful negligence.”

Bozkurt has denied the charges against him, insisting there was no wrongdoing.

“The disaster of the century occurred,” the state-run Anadolu Agency quoted him as saying in his defense. “My hotel was destroyed, just like 850,000 other constructions.”

Among those who testified on Thursday was Osman Akin, a gym teacher from northern Cyprus, who lost two of his children in the hotel rubble.

Akin and 16 other people were staying at a special lodge for teachers in the neighboring province of Kahramanmaras - the epicenter of the quake - which he said resisted the tremblor.

“We left (the lodge in Kahramanmaras) without even a nosebleed,” Anadolu quoted him as saying.

“Our children aged between 11 and 14 were buried in a rubble of sand (in Adiyaman). We hoped to reach our children (alive) and when that hope ended, we wanted to find (their bodies) in one piece,” he said.

Irem Aydogdu, whose sister Imran was among the victims, asked that the defendants be handed heavy sentences.

“My sister suffocated in a pile of sand,” she said. “These children were the bright faces and the pride of Cyprus.”

The indictment claims the hotel was initially built as a residence, that another floor was added to the structure in 2016, that building regulations were not complied with and that materials used in the construction were of inferior quality, according to Anadolu.

Poor construction and failure to enforce building codes even in Turkey’s earthquake-prone areas has been blamed for the extent of the destruction.