"The probes will be completed in the shortest possible time," Ali Erbay, chief prosecutur of the quake-hit state of Bingol told Anatolia news agency.

Authorities will notably focus on a collapsed public boarding school in the village of Celtiksuyu, where 84 children and a teached perished under tons of concrete, while about 100 others were rescued, he said.

The tremor, which hit Bingol with a magnitute of 6.4 on the Richter scale overnight Wednesday, claimed a total of 167 lives and injured hundreds more.

The death toll triggered a public outcry over the poor quality of construction in the quake-prone country and the inefficiency of state control, a problem which was also very much in the spotlight in 1999 when two consecutive quakes killed about 20,000 people in northwestern Turkey.

Turkey's construction sector is plagued by corruption.

Companies often disregard building regulations -- particularly in the construction of public buildings -- and authorities fail to enforce the law and sometimes collude with fraudulent contractors.

Education Minister Huseyin Celik said he had ordered all governors in the country to conduct studies on how resilient their schools are to earthquakes.

"In line with the results, all school buildings will be reinforced against earthquakes, starting with boarding schools in risky regions," Celik told reporters.

According to a preliminary study, the earthquake razed 305 buildings and damaged about 5,000 others across Bingol, an impoverished mainly Kurdish region, Anatolia said.

SPACE.WIRE