A tangle of white mannequins, their arms and legs pointing stiffly upwards, lay in the charred ruins of an Istanbul department store yesterday where 13 people died in a petrol bomb attack.
Everything else was destroyed in the blaze which tore through the busy five-storey building, driving terrified shoppers on to the roof in a frantic search for safety.
Turkish newspapers said Saturday's attack, one of the worst in living memory in the city, had been carried out by separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in revenge for the capture of their leader, Mr Abdullah Ocalan (52).
But a spokeswoman for the organisation's political wing denied the guerrillas carried out the attack and there was no official indication so far of PKK involvement.
Witnesses said three men threw petrol bombs into the ground floor of the department store in the Goztepe district and fled on foot. Within minutes the building was engulfed in flame.
"We heard this incredibly loud bang as all the windows shattered," said Bahadir (19).
Eyewitnesses described the shoppers' panic as they searched desperately in thick, black smoke for a fire escape.
"The whole building became like an enormous flame. Everyone had run up to the top and they were screaming `Help!'," a 10-year-old boy said.
Shopkeepers in the middle-income district said they spread makeshift nets for those trapped on the upper floors. Two found the courage to jump. One died on impact. The other suffered serious brain injuries.
Residents of a neighbouring apartment threw across a ladder, enabling one young woman, almost overwhelmed by the smoke, to escape. But her mother, an English teacher, died.
Relatives wept outside a mortuary at the local hospital. "Murderers!" cried one middle-aged man repeatedly. He had lost his daughter in the attack. Nine of those who died were women sales assistants.
The governor of the city, Mr Erol Cakir, said lives could have been saved if the first fire engines on the scene had been equipped with ladders.
The attack was the fourth in a week in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city. A wave of violence has swept Turkey since the capture in Kenya of Mr Ocalan. A militant leftwing group called TIKKO, known to have links with the PKK, admitted responsibility for one attack on a shopping centre last week that killed one man.
Turkey holds Mr Ocalan responsible for the deaths of more than 29,000 people in leading a 14-year-old campaign for self-rule in the country's mainly Kurdish south-east.
The Turkish Prime Minister, Mr Bulent Ecevit, has said Turkey could be engulfed in chaos after a parliamentary rebellion spearheaded by resurgent hardline Islamists has forced the recall of parliament tomorrow, raising a question mark over elections in April.
"I am concerned not for my party but for Turkey with respect to the postponement of elections. It will lead Turkey into a period of unrest and chaos," Ecevit said in a party meeting in the Black Sea town of Trabzon.
In a bid to delay elections, a group of parliamentarians on Saturday managed to push through a decision in an extraordinary session, recalling the legislature from its annual holiday.
The deputies, who were excluded from the candidate lists of their respective parties, were helped by the Islamist Virtue Party (FP), the biggest bloc in the legislature, in their efforts to recall parliament.