The widespread Turkish practice of illegal and unsafe housing construction came under fire yesterday. "Murderers," the mass circulation daily Hurriyet said alongside photographs of illicitly built apartment houses which had collapsed, while surrounding legal buildings stood firm.
"Once again rotten buildings, once again thieving, unscrupulous building contractors," the paper said. "The neighbours are alive and well," a caption said.
Like Hurriyet, most newspapers pointed out that there had been many warnings about the effects of a quake in Turkey's densely populated western region after a milder tremor killed more than 140 people in Adana last year.
Years of migration have left millions of Turks living in hastily built and unsafe houses atop an earthquake zone. Whole districts of Turkey's cities and towns are largely made up of buildings erected without regard to safety standards.
According to the Turkish Chamber of Commerce, 65 per cent of all buildings in Turkey are constructed without a permit or without much attention to building regulations.
But even this high rate of substandard construction can barely keep up with the flow of migrants to the cities.
Millions of refugees from the countryside have poured into Istanbul, Ankara and other major cities in recent years, fleeing the armed conflict between Kurdish rebels and the army. The housing problem is accordingly enormous. Turkey's city association Turkkent estimates that some seven million new dwellings will be needed by 2010.
Because the migrants cannot wait that long, most of the building that goes on is illicit.
This would seem a simple solution for the housing problem, were it not for the fact that most of Turkey is extremely earthquake-prone.
In all, 98 per cent of Turkey's territory falls into the danger zone, according to a government study, and 34 per cent - including Istanbul and Izmir - are in the top danger category.
More than 20 earthquakes in Turkey in the past 75 years have exceeded 6.0 on the Richter scale, one killing 45,000 people in Erzincan in 1939.
In the concrete jungle of modern Turkish cities, the effects of an earthquake are multiplied by the poor quality of construction.
As rescue teams sifted through the rubble for survivors yesterday, blame was already being apportioned for the death of more than 4,000 people.
Shoddy construction work, cheap building materials and a reckless disregard for safety regulations were generally held to be the cause of the catastrophe.