DIYARBAKIR, Turkey, 20 May 2006 — As many as 42 people died when a truck believed to be carrying Afghan illegal immigrants crashed with another truck on a highway in Turkey yesterday, officials said. Police and rescue workers lined dozens of bodies along the side of the motorway, which runs from Osmaniye to Gaziantep, awaiting the arrival of more ambulances in southeastern Turkey.
Regional Traffic Department Director Hasan Tugrul told reporters 42 people had died and six were injured. He also said the truck was carrying Afghans. “In the back of the truck tightly packed it is very likely were Afghan and Bangladeshi immigrants, who with the sudden crash, could have died piled up together,” Osmaniye Governor Zubeyir Kemelek told state-run Anatolia news agency. Turkey is a major transit route into Europe for illegal immigrants.
The Turkey Drivers and Motorists Federation said in February that 134,343 people had died and 2.2 million people were injured in traffic accidents in Turkey in the last 26 years. In 2004, 3,082 people were killed in 494,851 accidents, but in 2005, the number of deaths went up to 3,215 people in 570,419 accidents.
Kemelek said the accident occurred when the truck rammed a trailer truck with foreign license plates from behind near a toll booth on the highway to Gaziantep, 120 kilometers to the east. “The impact was very violent,” Kemelek said, “We have not been able to pull the truck driver out of the wreckage yet. He is dead too.”
Meanwhile, former Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, who sent troops into Cyprus in 1974 and helped spark a financial crisis in 2001, was in an induced coma yesterday after a stroke, the hospital treating him said. Ecevit, 80, a leftist poetry lover whose political career spanned some 50 years, underwent surgery early yesterday and was being kept in a coma to prevent another hemorrhage, Ankara’s military hospital said in a statement.
He was one of a handful of politicians who dominated Turkish politics for a decade before a landslide victory for the Islamist-based AK Party in 2002 in the wake of a deep financial crisis.
During his fifth term as prime minister in 2001, Ecevit was partly blamed for the economic melt-down that caused hundreds of thousands of job losses. After an argument with the president he publicly declared a “serious state crisis,” sending already edgy markets tumbling and starting the worst recession for decades.
In another development, Turkish secret service agents arrested at least 13 people on suspicion of setting up an illegal casino in the mixed Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot town of Pyla during a raid, state radio said yesterday.
The report said armed Turkish secret service agents and Turkish-Cypriot police swooped down on the village Thursday afternoon and arrested Turkish-Cypriot businessman Yusef Kisa. Others arrested included Kisa’s four bodyguards, three secretaries and four Kyrgyz women who were allegedly to have been employed at the casino, the report said.
