Poor construction blamed as Turkey quake kills 18
At least 18 people died and 27 were injured when an earthquake destroyed stone and mud houses in a village in eastern Turkey.
The earthquake caused heavy damage in Yigincal, a village near the Iranian border. Damage was also reported in nearby villages.
The Anatolia news agency reported 67 homes in Yigincal were destroyed, and that six of those killed were children younger than 10.
Television pictures showed village women wailing outside their homes, which were reduced to piles of stone, wood and mud.
The Istanbul-based Kandilli Observatory put the magnitude of the quake at 5.0. Several aftershocks were reported.
The local governor, Huseyin Yavuzdemir, blamed the deaths on poor construction of the homes.
Many people leave the village in the summer for mountain pastures, which probably prevented the death toll from being higher, he said.
Yavuzdemir told the Anatolia news agency that rescue operations had been completed and the death toll was not expected to rise.
Quakes are frequent in Turkey, which lies on the active faults. Two massive earthquakes hit northwestern Turkey in 1999, killing about 18,000 people.
In March, 10 people were killed in a magnitude 5.1 earthquake that destroyed mud-brick homes in 15 villages in nearby Erzurum. Most of the dead were children sleeping in their beds.
