An explosion and fire at a factory in western Turkey left 16 workers dead and 13 injured — two of them seriously — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday evening after a Cabinet meeting.

The blast took place at the HABAS steel plant in Aliaga, in the port city of Izmir . Officials like the city's governor Suleyman Elban had given reporters lower casualty figures earlier in the day as search and rescue efforts sought to locate people potenitally trapped under rubble.

The plant's production line was in the middle of a shift change rather than active production, according to the governor. Only some 200 workers were present instead of the expected 300.

An earlier statement from the governor's office said that the blast happened around noon (09:00 GMT) when an overhead crane toppled into a furnace during the casting of liquid steel.…