Rescuers were losing hope of finding alive any of the 18 children believed still to be buried underneath a collapsed school in eastern Turkey.
Rescue workers pulled out the bodies of 14 more children overnight.A total of 63 children have been found dead at the school, while 114 were pulled out alive, said an officer coordinating rescue efforts. Officials said the number of those known to have died in the earthquake stood at 147 with 520 injured.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed hope that survivors could still be found, and said the effects of the Thursday quake had highlighted 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 televised speech.
Expressing his condolences to the families of the victims - most of them children and teachers who were sleeping in a dormitory that collapsed when the quake struck in the early hours of Thursday - Mr Erdogan said nevertheless that the corruption that caused shoddy building was on the wane in Turkey.
"The work of the corrupt is becoming harder and harder, and the road is opening up more and more for the people," he said.
The earthquake, measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale, hit hardest the mainly Kurdish town of Bingol, in the province of the same name. Calm returned to Bingol tody after a protest over the official handling of the disaster boiled over into violent clashes between police and relatives of quake victims.
Bulldozers and heavy earth-moving equipment have moved in to sift through the wreckage, although rescuers have all but lost hope of finding more survivors among the 18 pupils still believed buried.
Angry parents and experts have blamed the death toll in the boarding school on poor building standards, and a probe had been launched against the company that built the school.
According to reports the dormitory was cheaply made and apparently never-inspected. The columns, lacking sufficient cement and metal rods, could not resist the weight of the building. Only steel cabinets were still standing basically serving as columns holding up the weight of the collapsed ceiling at one floor.
Meanwhile the head of the Turkish Red Crescent rejected accusations that his organization had not responded satisfactorily to the crisis, saying that it had sent more tents to Bingol than were in fact needed.
Agencies