The final official toll in Thursday's quake stood at 167 dead and 520 injured, Bingol provincial govenror Avni Cos told Anatolia news agency. Earlier reports had put the nubmer of injured at 537.

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 said.

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

The discovery of the bodies of Alican Celik and Cihat Avci, both 14, meant an end to the desperate search. Bulldozers began clearing the tangled concrete and steel wreckage of the four-storey building.

Bulent Arinc, speaker of Turkey's parliament in Ankara, wept as he witnessed the devastation.

His voice choking, he said he had come specially to share in the sorrow of the bereaved.

"Political reasons share responsibility for this murder," he said in a reference to corruption that has allowed builders to skirt safety regulations, and called for those responsible to be made to answer for their actions.

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 permanent new housing by winter for all who lost their homes.

Erdogan said the earthquake had exposed an "avalanche of abuses," and vowed to punish those responsible.

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

Turkey is criss-crossed by active faultlines, including one in northern Anatolia which caused two major earthquakes in 1999, killing 20,000 people.

The newspaper Vatan 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 building regulations: the walls' iron reinforcements were only loosely linked together and the load bearing columns did not conform to construction guidelines.

In Bingol, population 65,000, around 100,000 loaves of bread and 18,700 hot meals were being handed out daily to thousands camping in tents since the disaster.

Since Thursday some 1,000 minor aftershocks have shaken the region, according to a seismological institute in Istanbul.

The latest at 2:00 pm (1100 GMT) Sunday in the Izmir region of western Turkey measured 4.4 on the Richter scale.

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

Anger boiled over Friday into clashes between police and the public when several hundred gathered at the governor's office demanding more tents after a the night spent in the open air due to fear of aftershocks.

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

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

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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