The final toll in Thursday's quake stood at 167 dead and 537 injured, the governor of Bingol province Avni Cos told the Anatolia news agency.

At the school in Celtiksuyu, where 198 pupils were asleep in their dormitories when the earthquake struck, 84 children and one teacher perished and 114 survived, he said.

With the discovery of the bodies of Alican Celik and Cihat Avci, both aged 14, rescue teams were able to end their search and allow bulldozers to begin clearing the tangled concrete and steel wreckage, all that remains of the four-storey building.

A tearful crowd applauded the rescue teams as they left the school site.

The earthquake, measuring 6.4 on the open-ended Richter scale, struck in the early hours of Thursday, completely destroying 82 homes and damaging 1,100 others in the mainly Kurdish region, Cos told Anatolia.

Turkey is criss-crossed by active faultlines, including one in northern Anatolia which caused two major earthquakes east of the Marmara Sea in August and November 1999, killing 20,000 people.

Sunday's Turkish press echoed the anger of the victims' families, who blame the high death toll on shoddy building standards and corruption, which prevail in earthquake-prone Turkey.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who travelled to Bingol following the disaster, has pledged to provide permanent new housing by the winter for all those who lost their homes.

Erdogan said the earthquake had exposed an "avalanche of abuses," notably shoddy construction work and corruption, and promised to track down and punish those responsible.

The Vatan newspaper on Sunday quoted a report by the architects and engineers' assocation in Celtiksuyu slamming the poor quality of construction in the village.

The dormitory, the most fragile of the school's three buildings, was found to be in breach of a string of building regulations: the walls' iron reinforcements were only loosely linked together and the load bearing columns did not conform to construction guidelines.

In Bingol, which has a population of 65,000, around 100,000 loaves of bread and 18,700 hot meals are being handed out daily to the thousands of people who have been camped out in tents since the earthquake, Turkish media reported.

Since Thursday's earthquake, the region has been shaken with around 1,000 minor aftershocks, according to the Kandilli seismological institute in Istanbul, quoted by Anatolia. The latest at 2.00 pm (1100 GMT) Sunday in the Izmir region of western Turkey measured 4.4 on the Richter scale.

Tremors of medium-intensity shook the Antalya region of southern Turkey on Thursday and another on Saturday afternoon but caused no damage.

Simmering anger over the clumsy distribution of aid in the earthquake aftermath appeared to have cooled by Sunday, although the press remained critical of the government's handling of the crisis.

On Friday night, tension boiled over into clashes between police and the population, when several hundred angry people gathered in front of the governor's office to ask for tents after spending the night outside from fear of aftershocks.

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 Cos have 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.

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