Burnt dormitory not inspected to avoid 'sinful encounters'

Expert statements from the parlaiment research commission on the dormitory fire in Aladağ revealed that necessary inspections were avoided on the basis of avoiding 'sinful encounters'
Monday, 20 March 2017 05:59

Statements of the experts presenting in the Turkish parliament research commission revealed the chain of negligence in the southern Aladağ district of Adana which killed 11 schoolgirls and one other person. Senior fire expert engineers, Bekir Metin Demir and Turgut Cılgaoğlu, who prepared the report on Aladağ fire, presented to the parliament research commission.

Expert Bekir Metin Demir stated that the avoidance of inspection in girls’ dorm was justified by the possibility of 'sinful encounters' between inspectors and schoolgirls. The people who were responsible for the inspection said, “We usually don’t go in because it is a girls’ dorm” according to presentations of Demir and Cılgaoğlu.

This dorm belongs to Süleymancılar, a Sunni-Hanafi religious cult based in Turkey. Religious dormitories proliferated in recent years under the AKP rule and they are not properly inspected. Several other religious dormitories came into question due to negligence issues and lack of inspection. The sexual abuse scandal in the guesthouses of an Islamic foundation, Ensar, was another incident.

About the Aladağ fire, experts used the following expressions in their presentation:

“In small places, friend relationships are important in these inspections. Probably because they prepared the report based on these relationships, we also reported them as having minor defections. (…) There is also something very interesting here: For instance, we are talking with the members of governing board. We said, ‘Why don’t you go and inspect the dorm? Why didn’t you inspect?’ They said ‘well, since it is girl’s dorm, we don’t usually go in.’ For example, they hung curtains to the fire exit doors so that no one could see the inside. Of course, those curtains were burned. These are all the things that caused flash-overs and spreading of the fire.”

There were other scandalous details in the presentation. According to the report, the children affected by the smoke could not carry the 6 kg fire extinguishers, and the dormitory’s personnel, without the appropriate training, directed students to the upstairs instead of bringing them downstairs from the second floor where the fire began.