Istanbul, 25 February 2023 (dpa/MIA) - At least 184 people, mostly contractors, have been detained in Turkey over alleged negligence concerning collapsed buildings following the devastating earthquakes in the country's south, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ said on Saturday.

The mayor of Gaziantep province's Nurdağı district was also detained, state news agency Anadolu reported. Mayor Ökkeş Kavak is from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling party.

Erdoğan's government, in power over 20 years, has been criticized for overlooking poor construction standards, which may have contributed to the high death toll of over 44,000 in Turkey alone.

Across 11 Turkish provinces the deadly quakes on February 6, followed by nearly 10,000 aftershocks, damaged more than 173,000 buildings and left nearly 2 million people homeless, according to government data.

The wider region has since been rattled by big quakes. Tremors are expected to continue for the next two years in Turkey, according to disaster authority AFAD.

On Saturday, an earthquake of magnitude 5.2 shook the central Anatolian Turkish province of Niğde, the Kandilli earthquake monitoring centre said.

AFAD said there was no damage reported.

The earthquake's epicentre was located in the district of Bor, some 350 kilometres west the quake-ravaged Turkish-Syrian border region.

Elsewhere in Turkey, authorities considered quake preparedness plans to prevent a similar tragedy from happening.

Turkey's largest city Istanbul needs an urgent urbanization programme to rebuild or strengthen buildings, worth around $40 billion, authorities said.

The 15-million-strong industrial metropolis and cultural hub of Istanbul sits next to the notorious Northern Anatolian fault line, although it did not sustain damage in this month's quakes.

A potential quake of over magnitude 7.5 will damage nearly 500,000 buildings, inhabited by 6.2 million people, some 40% of the city's population, according to a 2021 report.

A series of tremors were meanwhile recorded in war-torn Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

Syria, still reeling from the massive earthquakes that killed thousands, said on Saturday it had registered 61 new tremors over the past 24 hours.

The Syrian National Earthquake Centre described the tremors as weak and said in an online statement that the seismological situation was starting to stabilize despite the large number of tremors.

Two tremors were also registered in northern Iraq, according to the Iraqi state news agency INA.

The first was recorded early Saturday in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh and the second less than an hour later in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan.

No casualties or damage was reported.

The tremors in Iraq measured 4.3 and 4, the Kurdish news website Rudaw reported.