Some are still searching for their loved ones a year after the Türkiye earthquake

Written by Burgu Caracas and Seda Caglayan

ISKENDERUN, Turkey (Reuters) – Tugba Akyuz and her family rushed to check on her brother, Mustafa Batuhan Gulic, on the morning of last year when a massive earthquake struck southern Turkey, only to find the ruins of his collapsed five-story apartment building. .

A year later, on the anniversary of the deadliest disaster in Turkey's modern history, they are still searching for him.

“If he had been alive, he would have found us,” Akyuz said at her home in Iskenderun, a Mediterranean port city in Hatay province.

“Everyone has somewhere to go on February 6. We have nowhere to go. We at least want to know where he is.”

Families whose loved ones are still missing continue to search for answers from authorities, agonizing over what may have happened to them in the wreckage, in hospitals and in cemeteries.

A Turkish rights group says 140 people are still missing after the earthquake that killed about 53,000 people in Turkey and another 6,000 in neighboring Syria.

Akyuz recalled the shock she felt upon seeing the unrecognizable rubble in her brother's house when she arrived that morning. She was eight months pregnant at the time, along with her mother, husband and two children.

Thinking he might have been trapped trying to escape from the balcony, they lifted some collapsed metal sheets – but he wasn't there.

For eight days, the family watched the searches. But they did not find Gulic, who studied architecture at Istanbul's Okan University and worked at his family's furniture company in Alexandretta.

Akyuz, 34, a lawyer, said they searched for evidence in court, the cemetery and in hospital records and filed a missing person's report with the public prosecutor's office.

In response to a photo and notice posted on social media, she received a call one day from a woman claiming to have seen her brother being taken from the building next door and placed in a white car.

She added that this revived hopes that he might still be alive for a while, but nothing happened. She now believes her brother was buried either in an unknown grave or in someone else's place.

She said: “We did not know what to do. We did not know who to ask. CCTV footage shows that he entered the house, and the phone signal was last detected in the building.” “My mother visited intensive care centres, morgues and cold rooms.”

“looking for her teeth”

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake flattened towns and areas of city centers in an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined.

Selahattin Caban, head of the Association for Solidarity with Earthquake Victims and Relatives of Missing Persons (DEMAK), said 140 people, including 38 children, were still missing, including 118 in Hatay, the worst-hit area.

“Some were not found under the rubble, others were missing in the hospital,” he told Reuters.

Family Minister Mahinur Ozdemir Goktas said in statements broadcast on Turkish radio stations in recent days that there are no children missing after the earthquake. It and other authorities did not issue any statement regarding the 140 missing persons declared by DEMAK.

Demak's families requested to meet Goktas and called on parliament to conduct an investigation. “Even if our missing loved ones die, we want to find their graves,” Caban said.

Last month, the ruling Justice and Development Party led by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its allied Nationalist Movement Party refused to respond to a written parliamentary question about children missing from the earthquake submitted by the opposition Iyi Party.

In Antakya, the capital of Hatay, Ayson Celnik, 65, tells a similar story of an endless search for a brother.

After the quake, she waited next to the pile of rubble where her sister Perna and brother-in-law Kemal Torun lived on the fourth floor of a seven-story apartment building on Adnan Menderes Street.

She said that she did not leave the place even for a single moment, and on the sixth day an excavator arrived to begin the search for the bodies. But Birna and Kamal, both 58-year-old teachers, were not found. There were no traces of them in the subsequent soil survey that I followed closely.

“There was a market downstairs. The generators exploded there. Then the fire broke out,” Celinek said. “Maybe they melted in the fire.”

She filed a petition with the public prosecutor's office for her relatives and several other people who she said were still missing from that building, and said she would “continue the matter until the end.”

She still visits the area at least three times a week. “My sister was everything to me,” Selink said during a recent visit. “Forget the bones, I'm looking for her teeth.”

(Reporting by Burcu Karakas and Seda Caglayan; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and William MacLean)

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