No cries had been heard in nearly 24 hours from inside the ruins of a boarding school that collapsed on top of some 200 children and teachers when an earthquake struck the region in the early hours of Thursday, rescuers said.

"Hope is dead," one rescue worker told AFP as bulldozers and earth-moving machinery sifted through the wreckage, searching for the 10 to 15 children still thought to be beneath the ruins.

"We are hoping for a miracle," said Abdulmuttalik Celik, who had spent the three days since the quake searching for his 14-year-old son Celik.

Up to now, 115 survivors and 73 bodies have been pulled out of the rubble of the school in Celtiksuyu, in the mainly Kurdish Bingol region that was hit hardest by the quake, which measured 6.4 on the Richter scale.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the quake had exposed an "avalanche of abuses," notably shoddy construction work and corruption.

"It is perfectly clear that this painful accident has highlighted infrastructure problems which can be explained by thefts of building equipment, corruption, illegality and injustice," he said in a speech on the CNN-Turk television channel.

Erdogan expressed his condolences to the families of the victims and said such corruption was on the wane in the country.

"The work of the corrupt is becoming harder and harder, and the road is opening up more and more for the people," he said.

Angry parents and experts have blamed the death toll at the boarding school on poor building standards, and a probe had been launched against the company that built the school.

Calm returned to Bingol Saturday after violence erupted Friday, when several hundred people gathered in front of the governor's office to ask for tents after spending the night outside from fear of aftershocks.

Tension boiled over after police drove a van deep into the centre of the crowd of protestors, who had disobeyed an order to disperse and some of whom tried to force their way into the governor's office.

In chaotic scenes, security forces fired dozens of rounds in the air with automatic rifles, while protestors hit back with sticks and stones and pounded police cars with iron bars.

The unrest, which underscored tensions between authorities and the region's mainly Kurdish population, resulted in the sacking of the city's police chief.

Erdogan and Governor Avni Cos both blamed the clashes on provocation by elements of the old independentist PKK Kurdish rebels.

Bingol is one of the most poverty-stricken provinces of eastern Anatolia. It has been devastated by the armed rebellion pusued by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) -- now known as KADEK -- between 1984 and 1999 in its struggle for self-rule in the region.

Many of Bingol's inhabitants spent another night out in the open in parks on Friday for fear of aftershocks.

Meanwhile the head of the Turkish Red Crescent rejected accusations that his organization had not responded satisfactorily to the crisis.

"We sent tents for 60,000 people, while the population of Bingol is 63,000," Ertan Gonen told Anatolia news agency.

Authorities hoped to hand out at least 7,000 tents by the end of Saturday.

SPACE.WIRE