Three dead, 13 injured as truck carrying agriculture workers crashes in Gaziantep

GAZİANTEP – Doğan News Agency

DHA Photo

Two agriculture workers along with their baby have died and 13 others have been injured after a pickup truck carrying workers crashed in the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep.

Halil Alınmış and his wife Hüsniye Alınmış, two agriculture workers originally from the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, died at the scene as a pickup truck carrying 16 people, mostly agriculture workers, turned over following a tire blowout near Gaziantep’s Nizip district on July 14. 

The Alınmış family’s one-year old toddler Esma was taken to the Nizip Public Hospital for treatment, but her life could not be saved. All the 13 injured, including the driver, were related to each other, sharing the same last names of Alınmış and Gündoğdu.

The pickup truck was heading from the Reyhanlı district of the southern province of Hatay to Şanlıurfa at the time the crash occurred on the Gaziantep-Şanlıurfa highway.

The bodies of Halil and Hüsniye Alınmış were taken to the local forensic medical institution for examination following the initial inspection of the scene. The highway was temporarily closed to traffic as the workers’ possessions were strewn across the road after the crash.  

Turkey has seen a rising toll of agriculture worker deaths in recent months, with the July 14 crash marking the second of its kind so far in 2015.

As many as 15 agriculture workers, 13 of whom were female, died in another pickup truck crash in the Aegean province of Manisa on July 6.

In a separate crash last year, 18 agriculture workers lost their lives as a minibus carrying a group of seasonal agricultural workers turned over in the southern province of Isparta on Oct. 31, 2014.

At least 646 workers died in Turkey in the first five months of 2015, according to a report released on June 2 by the Worker Health and Work Safety Assembly (İSGM), a non-profit platform that deals with worker health and safety issues.

The number of agriculture sector workers who died in May alone was at least 39, the report states.