Collapsed Isias hotel convict asks for release to go on Hajj

Bilal Balci, a former municipal civil engineer at Turkey’s Adiyaman municipality, who was last month handed a ten-year suspended prison sentence and released on bail conditions for his role in the collapse of the city’s Isias hotel, on Monday requested to be released from those conditions to be able to go on the Hajj.

A total of 72 people, including 35 Cypriots, of whom 24 were children, were killed when the Isias hotel collapsed.

According to Turkey’s Anka news agency, Balci wrote in his request that he had successfully registered to complete the Hajj, which is this year to go ahead in May, and that he “cannot find any reason for the decision to impose bail conditions other than a feeling of pressure on the investigative authority and subsequently the court”.

This, he wrote, was because the case “has been brought to the media’s attention”.

Balci was one of three defendants to be handed a suspended ten-year prison sentence, with the bail conditions imposed on him including a ban on leaving Turkey. That ban will have to be lifted if he is to complete the Hajj in May.

Alongside him, former Adiyaman deputy mayor Osman Bulut and former Adiyaman town planning director Mehmet Salih Alkayis were handed the same sentence.

The three other defendants, a second former Adiyaman town planning director by the name of Yusuf Gul, building auditor Abdurrahman Karaarslan, and technician Fazli Karakus were all acquitted of all charges and as such freed.

Adiyaman’s first high criminal court had last week released the reasoning of its verdict explaining that it had decided to send none of the six to prison because, among other things, Adiyaman province had been categorised as “high-risk” for earthquakes.

It also highlighted the fact that the two earthquakes which occurred on the day the hotel collapsed were strong, measuring 7.7 and 7.6 on the Richter scale respectively.

On this front, it stated that “an earthquake of such a magnitude has not occurred in the Adiyaman province in recent history”, before going on to point out that “most” of the six defendants live in Adiyaman.

Additionally, it pointed out that decades had passed between the issuing of planning permits and operation permits and the hotel’s collapse in 2023, before offering its conclusion.

“It has been concluded that a definitive conclusion cannot be reached as to whether the defendants committed the alleged crimes with a willingness to accept any outcome or with ‘probable intent’, and in this context, it has been concluded that the defendants’ actions should be evaluated within the scope of ‘conscious negligence’,” it said.

This, it added, is “because they hoped that the foreseeable outcome would not occur or relied on chance”.

In short, therefore, the court decided to convict the defendants of causing death by conscious negligence rather than the more severe charge of causing death by probable intent as they had hoped the hotel would not collapse after it was built.

After the ruling had been made, Pervin Aksoy Ipekcioglu, whose daughter Serin was among those killed at the Isias hotel, expressed disgust at it, saying that “our motherland’s courts told me, ‘you were guilty for sending her, I condemn you to a lifetime of her absence without justice being secured’”.

“Now, those responsible get to go home, and I go home without her. Only one word crossed my mind: disgrace … Then, I looked around. Those who sent us were there for the show, but they were absent when the verdict was announced, to avoid making eye contact with the system to which they were grateful,” she said.

She added that she does not forgive the judges who made the ruling, and said, “may every breath taken by every immoral person they allowed to live free through those decisions be forbidden to them”.

It is expected that the families will appeal the ruling, as well as a ruling made by Adiyaman’s third high criminal court in 2024 which saw six other defendants, including the hotel’s owner Ahmet Bozkurt and architect Erdem Yilmaz, found guilty of causing death by conscious negligence, and five more freed.