This is the Guardian.

2 Men Lie On Their Sides On The Cobble Stones

These men are the looters and now they've been caught. The video has been shared more than 1000 times.

There are others in this vein. Justice has been served.

Next in my Twitter feed, the response. 2 young men appear with scragly beards and bruises and bleeding around the eyes.

We are the youths you have seen in the video that has been making the rounds.

We are not looters, we went downtown my cousin and I to get the medicine that our family urgently needed.

On our way back, members of the security forces, seeing my backpack and the medicine in our hands treated us like looters, took us behind the building and beat us, innocent earthquake victims mercilessly.

We are not looters, we are Turkish youth who love our country and we're there to take care of our needs.

In February, the day after two earthquakes of 7.9 and 7.8 magnitude rippled across multiple Turkish provinces and a swath of northwestern Syria affecting around 14 million people on the Turkish side alone,

Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a state of exception in the affected region.

This measure, he said, would give him the powers needed to combat plunderers who take advantage of the chaos to rob upstanding citizens.

No one really knew who the alleged plunderers were. Some seemed to think they were Syrian refugees.

Selat Din Demirtash, imprisoned leader of the People's Democracy Party, HDP, called on the public to dismiss rumors of refugees plundering collapsed buildings.

Others, friends of mine, said that the plunderers were real.

They have some friends whose home had been destroyed by the earthquake they told me, and will now live in a car.

A man came and knocked on the window, said that the governor had announced that the local dam had broken and the place would soon be flooded.

Having no possible streets before them and rubble blocking their car, they got out and ran for their lives and were robbed.

The current death toll of the two earthquakes, nearing 55,000, is more than 100 times the human cost of the failed military coup of 2016,

and has now surpassed the number of people who have died in four decades of guerrilla war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK.

It is a catastrophe that is sadly not without precedent.

Slow violence is not slow in Turkey. Anyone living in the country in the past decade has witnessed a long trail of disasters, some partly natural and others wholly human in origin.

...