Court proceedings continued on Wednesday in the case against six former public officials who stand accused of “causing death through negligence” for their roles in the sequence of events which led to the collapse the Isias hotel in the southeastern Turkish city of Adiyaman, which killed 72 people, 35 of whom were Cypriots.

The hotel collapsed during the first of two powerful earthquakes which hit the southeast of Turkey on February 6, 2023.

The six defendants include former Adiyaman deputy mayor Osman Bulut, with criminal investigations into the conduct of public officials who were serving when the hotel’s owners were filing applications for various construction and change of use permits over the years having been launched last May.

It had been found that permits had been given to the Isias hotel which did not comply with the relevant laws, and that information written on permits did not match the work which had been carried out.

At Wednesday’s hearing, it had been hoped that a new scientific report on the hotel’s collapse, written by Izmir’s Dokuz Eylul university, would be presented. However, this report was not ready, and it is now hoped that it will be submitted at the next hearing.

Given that the report was not ready, the case has been adjourned until November 6.

The families of the Cypriots who were killed in the building’s collapse, of whom 24 were children, are expected to ask the court to upgrade the charges.

They hope the six defendants and the six people who were found guilty of causing death by conscious negligence leading to the building’s collapse on December 25 will all face charges of having intentionally killed the victims.

Wednesday’s court proceedings were attended by the north’s ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel, who said outside court that “I am here not just as a prime minister, but as a father who feels pain in his heart.

“I understand that mother, that father, that brother, because this pain is the common burden of every person with a conscience. The children we lost there were all of our children, and were the future of our country,” he said, adding that the fight for justice for the children has seen them become “symbols of justice, conscience, and humanity”.

He also made a rare comment on the details of the case itself, saying, “we want justice to be served, but we want complete and total justice”.

“What happened is the result of a chain of serious negligence, not just ‘conscious negligence’, and as such, it warrants a trial based on intent… This case is a turning point and concerns not only the reckoning of the past but also the security of the future,” he said.