Revised Turkish Quake Toll Stirs Controversy

Turkish opposition politicians on Wednesday questioned the accuracy of the official death toll from the Aug. 17 earthquake after the number went up by more than 5,000, then fell back down to about where it had been for the past few days.

The official toll reached 17,997 late Tuesday. But Wednesday morning, the government crisis center revised the figure down to 12,514.

“These numbers are not convincing,” said Abdullah Gul, senior member of the opposition Islamic Virtue Party.

Officials at the crisis center initially said a data entry error accounted for the improperly high death count. Later, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit told reporters that an official of the Izmit municipality had given misleading information to secure more aid for the area.

Sefa Sirmen, the mayor of Izmit, said the discrepancy was due to human error by a City Hall computer engineer and that there was no ulterior motive. The engineer was being interrogated by police.

“We are not going to be given aid by the number of dead but by the scope of the damage,” Sirmen said.

After an increase of more than 5,000 Saturday, the toll’s slow rise since Sunday has raised suspicion.

“If one visits the area, talks to the people and makes a simple estimation, you realized that there are at least 20,000 dead,” Gul said.

But Gul acknowledged that counting the dead was not an easy task because many are still under mounds of rubble and others have been buried without official notification.

The prime minister’s office said the government would make a statement clarifying the issue.

The United Nations said last week that the death toll in the magnitude 7.4 quake could reach as high as 40,000, basing its figure on information from the Turkish authorities and a request by the government for 45,000 body bags.

Michael Elmquist of the United Nations in Geneva said the Turkish government has since “reassessed its need. They have already received 15,000 to 20,000 body bags and said they did not need any more.”

The United Nations is no longer giving a figure for presumed dead. Elmquist said the exact number will probably never be known.

“If you were to recover all the bodies, you would have to take apart the buildings in small pieces . . . and we’re running against time because the bodies are decomposing,” he said.

On Wednesday, relief workers following government orders to clear rubble to reduce the risk of disease dumped the remains of collapsed buildings into the Sea of Marmara off the coastal town of Yalova.

A crushed jumble of concrete and furniture stretched about 60 yards into the sea and about 130 yards along the coast.