Arrest warrant issued for contractor Hasan Hüseyin Sever in Furkan Apartment case

Nizip Heavy Penal Court has issued an arrest warrant for contractor Hasan Hüseyin Sever in the Furkan Apartment case, the building that collapsed in Gaziantep's Nizip district during the 6 February earthquakes and in which 51 people lost their lives.

The court convened to examine the file after the 16th Criminal Chamber of the Gaziantep Regional Court of Justice issued its second reversal ruling. The Chamber ruled that the investigation had been conducted incompletely, citing contradictory expert reports, witnesses who were not heard, and the failure to discuss the provisions on conscious negligence with respect to defendants who are public officials. Indicating that the building's de facto contractor was Hasan Hüseyin Sever, the Chamber found the acquittal ruling erroneous; it also deemed unlawful the setting of the sentence given to technical supervisor Yılmaz Şahin Yurtyapan at the upper limit. The Chamber further requested that the faulty conduct that caused the building's collapse and the defendants' respective degrees of fault be determined separately by an expert panel.

In line with this, Nizip Heavy Penal Court decided to obtain a new expert report. It ruled that the detention of technical supervisor Yılmaz Şahin Yurtyapan and workplace owner Eyüp Öğüt shall continue, and that the arrest warrant issued for the detention of the other workplace owner, Faik Öğüt, shall remain in force. The hearing will be held on 21 January 2027.

In the case, contractor Abdullah Devrim Sever and Hasan Hüseyin Sever, technical supervisor Yılmaz Şahin Yurtyapan, workplace owners Faik Öğüt, Eyüp Öğüt and Nejdet Alpay, along with Coşkun Şahin, who was pulled injured from the rubble, and his brother Ömer Şahin, are being tried on the charge of "causing the death and injury of more than one person by conscious negligence". A case had been filed against Mehmet Aslan, the Nizip Municipality's Director of Zoning at the time, Deputy Director of Zoning Works Orhan Zoroğlu, and construction engineers Oktay Aktaş and Bülent Bilici on the charge of "causing the death and injury of more than one person by negligence". The decisions were announced by the ANKA news agency.