A Turkish town buried its dead yesterday in the wake of an earthquake that shattered the country's southern cotton belt and killed at least 112 people. In the municipal cemetery in Ceyhan, a small group of mourners, some with cuts and bruises from the quake, helped lay one 50-year-old victim, Cemil Demir cioglu, to rest. Labourers aided by a mechanical digger prepared graves for 16 bodies and were working on more.
Ceyhan, a commuter town near the regional capital Adana, was the hardest hit by Saturday's quake, which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale. Its epicentre was just to the south of Adana.
"We took a dead child out of there a short while ago," a gendarmerie officer said as he stood by a pile of concrete and mangled steel rods that had been a seven-floor block of flats.
Government officials said the death toll stood at 112, with 46 bodies taken to a hospital morgue in the town. Another 44 died in Adana and the rest in surrounding villages.
The quake struck on Saturday at 5 p.m. and was felt in Cyprus, Syria and Israel, although the casualties and damage were confined to Turkey. Officials said there were dozens of aftershocks including a quake early yesterday evening measuring 4.1, but there were no reports of further damage.
The death toll would have been far higher had many residents of apartment blocks not spent the warm afternoon outdoors or in cafes, watching the World Cup.
Flimsy building blocks collapsed. Cracks snaked up walls that still stood. Two mosques lost their minarets and holes gaped on the main road to Adana.
At least 30 homes and apartment blocks and five workplaces collapsed. Three hospitals, six schools and a bridge were also damaged.
Rescue workers with sniffer dogs, cranes and cutting equipment pulled bodies from the rubble in ones and twos. Aid workers set up a small tent city near Adana to house some of the thousands of people who had slept in the open air overnight in fear of aftershocks and unstable buildings.
The health ministry included hundreds of injections of antidote serum for snake and scorpion poison in medical aid sent to the region because of the number of people camped outdoors.
Hospitals were struggling to cope with some 1,517 casualties. In the gardens and car park of an overcrowded local hospital, patients with wounds and broken limbs lay with intravenous drips attached to their arms.
Electricity was cut in some districts and telephone contact and water supplies were sporadic.
The German Foreign Minister, Mr Klaus Kinkel, said Bonn was ready to offer Ankara help. Sweden, Britain, Switzerland, Israel, Italy and France made similar offers.
President Suleyman Demirel promised a return to normality. The Prime Minister, Mr Mesut Yilmaz, visited stricken parts of the province, a humid, cotton-producing plain known in ancient times as Cilicia.
The biggest recent tremor in Turkey in 1992 killed 485 people in the eastern town of Erzincan. That disaster prompted complaints that many buildings in the town, frequently hit by tremors, had been constructed cheaply and illegally without taking earthquakes into consideration.
The deputy governor of Adana, Mr Ardahan Totuk, called for inhabitants of damaged houses to spend the night outside for fear of further aftershocks and said construction standards would be examined of the buildings which collapsed.
"Human life shouldn't be this cheap. Those responsible will be called to account when identified," he said.
Red Crescent, the Turkish aid organisation, sent tents, thousands of blankets and four portable kitchens to Adana, a sprawling city of several million people near the Mediterranean.
The Ceyhan oil terminal was not affected, according to an Energy Ministry statement. Iraqi crude from an Iraq-Turkey pipeline has been loaded at Ceyhan in recent weeks under the "oil-for-food" deal with the United Nations.
An army onslaught against Muslim religious activism will reach new heights today when the architect of political Islam in Turkey goes on trial, a year after losing a power struggle with the generals. The former prime minister, Mr Necmettin Erbakan - the first Islamist to lead modern Turkey - is charged with slander in a case seen as retribution for challenging the predominance of the secularist establishment.
Mr Erbakan (71) was removed from office in June, 1997 by the fiercely anti-Islamist army commanders whose shadow now hangs over efforts of the current Prime Minister, Mr Yilmaz, to hold early elections next April.