At least 100 people were missing and feared dead yesterday following the collapse of a building block in central Turkey that left 15 confirmed dead and 29 injured and raised questions about the country's construction standards. Rescue workers said they hoped to still find survivors under the rubble of the 11-storey apartment block that collapsed late on Monday in the central town of Konya. "We can see that air pockets where people can survive formed when the building collapsed. I believe we will be able to find people still alive in the lower storeys," Hakan Korkut, from the non-governmental search and rescue organisation AKUT, told NTV. A 30-year-old woman was found alive some 16 hours after the building collapsed but two more corpses were unearthed soon afterwards, taking the confirmed death toll to 15, CNN-Turk television reported. "There are voices coming from the back of the building. There are obviously people alive. We are trying to reach them," city governor Ahmet Kayhan told NTV television. The collapse was being widely attributed to shoddy construction. "Human life is so important, it must not be sacrificed to irresponsibility and contempt for the rules," President Ahmet Necdet said in a message of condolence to the families of those who died. Ramazan Bayraktar, a firefighter taking part in the rescue effort, told NTV that the building clearly did not comply with safety regulations. "It's as if there wasn't even any concrete, as though the building was simply made of earth," he added. All that was left of the 11-storey structure was a pile of rubble five metres high. The city governor initially estimated that at least 70 people remained buried under the rubble. Kayhan subsequently said there were 144 people registered as living in 36 flats in the building. But at the time when the structure collapsed, residents would have been celebrating Eid Al Adha and may have had relatives and friends visiting them. Television footage showed rescue workers, wearing helmets and bright orange coats, digging at the rubble with shovels, while a crane lifted heavy slabs of concrete away to allow access to possible survivors. Dozens of soldiers, including a special army unit, were called in to help. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Turkish rescue workers stand on the rubble of a 10-story apartment block, which collapsed in Konya, central Turkey, February 3, 2004. (REUTERS/Ihlas News Agency-IHA)