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Turkey quake search called off
BINGOL, Turkey -- Rescue workers in southeastern Turkey have abandoned the search for survivors of Thursday's earthquake that killed at least 167 people, including 83 boys in a collapsed school dormitory. Officials said the search at the school, in the remote village of Celtiksuyu, 15 kilometers (9 miles) east of Bingol, had stopped because no signs of life had been found under the rubble since early on Friday. Teams located four bodies overnight, retrieving the last, that of 14-year-old Cihat Avci, Sunday morning. Rescuers said Avci had been squeezed between the bunk beds where he had been sleeping when the magnitude 6.4 quake struck early Thursday. "I can just remember his smile," teacher Fikret Nimetligil, who was helping identify the bodies, told The Associated Press. "Some people lost one or two children, I lost 80," he said of the 83 children, aged 7 to 16, who perished in the dormitory. Crews lowered Avci's body from a pile of concrete slabs and twisted steel into an ambulance and quietly collected their equipment. More than 80 buildings collapsed throughout the region, AP reported Bingol Governor Huseyin Avni Cos as saying, including the dormitory housing 198 children. Most of the students were the sons and daughters of poor Kurdish farmers from surrounding villages with no schools. Another 110 buildings were damaged and more than 1,000 people were injured. Cos was the focus of protests that turned into riots on Friday by local residents complaining of slow food and tent distribution in the disaster area. The governor promised a full investigation into allegations that the state-run school dormitory had been badly built by corrupt contractors. "Just as it might be faulty building, the placement may have been wrong, or there may have been neglect by state officials doing the inspection. The investigation will find out who is responsible. The builders will be arrested sooner or later," Cos said, according to Reuters. When the earthquake struck, the cheaply made student dormitory crumbled, crushing scores of children as they slept. The columns, lacking sufficient cement and metal rods, could not resist the weight of the building. Only steel cabinets were still standing -- basically serving as columns holding up the weight of the collapsed ceiling at one floor. Earthquakes are common in Turkey, which lies at the convergence of three major tectonic plates. Thursday's earthquake occurred 70 kilometers (43 miles) southeast of the epicenter of a magnitude 6.1 earthquake that killed one person and injured several others in January. A magnitude 8.0 quake in 1939 killed an estimated 33,000 people about 75 miles northwest of Thursday's epicenter. Copyright 2003 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
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