The Isias hotel in Adiyaman collapsed on the night of February 6, 2023 under the effect of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake which killed more than 53,500 people in Turkey and nearly 6,000 in Syria. .
The owner and architect of the hotel in which 72 people, including 26 Turkish Cypriot teenagers, died, were each sentenced Wednesday to nearly 18 and a half years in prison.
The Adiyaman court (south-east) also sentenced a son of the owner to more than 17 years in prison and an engineer found guilty of ignoring construction standards to more than 16 years in prison for also having “ caused death (…) by conscious negligence,” the official Anadolu news agency reported. Two other engineers received more than eight years in prison.
According to the indictment, cited by the Turkish press, one of the floors of the hotel had been built illegally. An expert report also highlighted the poor quality of the construction materials and the absence of a soil study.
The collapse of the Isias hotel caused great emotion in the small Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), where 35 of the victims, 26 teenagers and their companions who had come to participate in a volleyball tournament, were from.
It is the greatest tragedy in the history of the separatist republic, recognized only by Ankara. In addition to relatives of the deceased teenagers, the Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed Republic, Ünal Üstel, was present in Adiyaman when the verdict was read.
More than 260 people involved in the construction of buildings that collapsed in the February 2023 earthquake were arrested in the following weeks, some while trying to flee Turkey. Among them, the contractor responsible for the construction of a building in the city of Adana (south), in which 96 people died, was sentenced in September to 865 years in prison.
