Tainted alcohol kills 33 in Ankara: governor’s office

Ankara: Thirty-three people have died in Ankara after drinking bootleg alcohol and another 20 are in intensive care, the regional governor’s office told AFP Friday.

Such poisonings are relatively common in Turkey, where clandestine production is widespread and bootleg alcohol is often tainted with methanol, a toxic substance that can cause blindness, liver damage and death.

Police had seized 102 tonnes of tainted alcohol and arrested 13 people on suspicion of selling it, Ankara governor Vasip Sahin told reporters on Friday.

Although the governor did not give a timeline, his office’s X account had on Tuesday referred to a “an increase in counterfeit alcohol deaths in recent days”.

A spokesman for the governor’s office told AFP he believed the figure was “from the beginning of the year”.

Last month, 38 people died in the space of four days in Istanbul after drinking counterfeit alcohol in a surge of cases that by January 17, had left another 26 people in intensive care.

Since then, there has been no official statement on whether the number of victims increased, nor on the condition of those in intensive care.

Asked by AFP for an update on Friday, a spokesman for the Istanbul governor’s office said: “We are not going to make a statement on that.”

Although Turkey is a nominally secular country, alcohol taxes have risen sharply under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a Muslim who vociferously opposes drinking.