A court in Turkey’s Bolu province has imposed multiple aggravated life sentences on 11 defendants, including the owner of the Grand Kartal Hotel, Halit Ergül, for their responsibility in the devastating fire at the Kartalkaya ski resort earlier this year, which killed 78 people, half of them children.
According to public broadcaster TRT Haber, the verdict was handed down on 31 October during the third hearing of the trial, after hearing the defendants for the terrible tragedy that occurred on 21 January, when the fire swept through the 12-storey building to coincide with the winter school holidays . A total of 32 people were on trial – 20 of them in pre-trial detention – including the owner of the hotel and several municipal officials. The fire at the Gran Kartal hotel killed 78 people and injured 137: almost half of those killed were children on holiday with their families.
Along with Ergül, the Bolu court sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment several members of the board of directors of the company that owned the hotel – including the businessman’s wife and daughters – as well as the deputy mayor of Bolu, Sedat Gülener, the acting head of the fire service, Kenan Coşkun, and one of the firefighters, İrfan Acar. The court justified the sentencing to the most severe punishment under the Turkish Penal Code by the high number of children killed, thus handing down aggravated life sentences for each of the child victims, as well as life sentences for the remaining deceased.
In total, those convicted received 34 aggravated life sentences for the deceased minors and 44 more for the other victims, with no sentence reductions applied. The announcement of the court decision, long awaited by the families of the victims, was greeted with applause in the courtroom. Ergül, the hotel’s owner, had previously denied any responsibility, claiming that all blame lay solely with his staff and denying that fire alarms and other security systems were inoperative, despite numerous testimonies from survivors and expert reports confirming the contrary.
The tragedy, in which guests and workers trapped on the upper floors of the hotel were forced to jump out of windows or even descend with sheets in the face of the advancing flames and smoke, shocked Turkey and unleashed strong political and social pressure demanding accountability for the accumulation of negligence, deficiencies in fire safety measures and lack of inspections: factors that, as the victims’ families claim, contributed to the high number of deaths.
VOTE
EDITORIAL TEAM
🧿 About us
.
Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
…
📣 Your ADVERTISING on Hispanatolia
.
🤗 HELP US WITH A DONATION:
💗 Paypal
