Turkey’s death toll reaches 63

Officials believe the remaining 40 people were trapped in the bottom floors of the 11-storey building as they tried to escape when the building began to crumble, municipality spokesman Mehmet Yasa said.

However, he said there was almost no hope of finding any survivors, and teams were mostly looking to recover bodies.

The last survivor was rescued on Tuesday evening, almost 20 hours after the collapse of the building. A total of 28 survivors were evacuated from the rubble.

The collapse has been blamed on shoddy construction and a Turkish court charged two contractors, Vedat Kaya and Ismail Canlier, with negligence for ignoring building codes yesterday. It was not clear how many years they could face in prison if convicted. No trial date was set. The two will be held by police pending trial.

Most of the bodies discovered in the rubble were squeezed between the ceiling and the floor of the rooms in which the victims had been when the building collapsed accordion-like. The building was only five years old and considered upscale in Konya.

Inspectors said lack of controls during construction and poor materials were seen as initial reasons for the collapse.

Shoddy construction has been blamed for many of the deaths in the 1999 quakes in western Turkey that killed more than 18,000 people. Experts say little has been done to address the problem of poor construction in the country.

About 140 people lived in the building’s 37 apartments, officials said, but it was unclear how many were inside at the time. At least 25 residents were not in the building, but others may have had visitors at the time. There was an engagement party on the second floor of the building, attended by about 25 people, said Yasa.

Many families had been celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid-al-Adha with friends and relatives when the building collapsed.