Steel plant blast in western Turkey kills at least 10 as toll climbs through the day

The death toll from Monday's explosion at the Habas steelworks in western Turkey climbed through the day, reaching 10 dead with four workers still believed trapped under the rubble, the provincial governor said, while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan later put the number of dead at 16.

The blast tore through the plant in Aliaga, in Izmir province, at around 0900 GMT, about noon local time. The governor's office said an overhead crane toppled into a furnace during the casting of liquid steel. Fifteen people were injured, two of them critically, and search teams were still working through the wreckage on Monday afternoon. Izmir Governor Suleyman Elban gave the updated toll in a televised briefing. Izmir Mayor Cemil Tugay said the exact number of casualties would only be known once the debris was cleared.

Habas said the accident happened during planned maintenance on one of its electric arc furnaces and that the cause was being examined with the authorities. The Menemen chief prosecutor's office has opened an investigation, with four prosecutors and a panel of experts examining the site, Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said. Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said emergency teams fought the blaze while searching for casualties. Witnesses described the force of the blast: Nuri Ali Ulker told the state-run Anadolu agency that the ground shook and it was very intense, while Deniz Ulker said it felt like the earth's crust was shifting beneath us and she thought it was an earthquake.

The two official death tolls do not agree, and neither has been reconciled with the other. The governor's televised update — 10 dead, 15 injured, four people believed under the wreckage — is the latest count from the authority running the rescue on site, and it supersedes the governor's office's first statement of three dead, 14 injured and 10 missing. Erdoğan's figure of 16 came later, after a cabinet meeting, and was reported by Anadolu. The cause as stated by the governor's office, a crane falling into a furnace during casting, is consistent across the official statements; Habas's own account describes an accident during planned maintenance, which does not contradict the crane account but leaves the sequence unclear. The count of seriously injured also varies between reports, with the Associated Press putting two in critical condition.

The toll may still rise, with four people unaccounted for. The Habas plant, established in 1987, can produce 4.5 million tons of steel a year, and the shutdown and the investigation will be the next facts to watch. A workers' rights group, the Health and Safety Labour Watch, said two other workers had died in accidents at the same plant in the past two weeks, according to BBC Turkish — a claim the prosecutors' investigation will have to answer once the rescue ends.