Enforce the Law, End the Impunity Policies that Protect the Perpetrators!
5 March 2024
On 2 November 1993, Abdülmecit Baskın, Altındağ District Registry Director in Ankara, was taken into custody by special operations police. On 4 October 1993, his body bearing traces of torture was found by a farmer in Gölbaşı district.
Kurdish businessperson Behçet Cantürk was abducted on 14 January 1994 together with Recep Kuzucu. On 15 January 1994 their tortured bodies were found near Sapanca.
Eighteen years after the incident, on 26 March 2011, special operations police officer Ayhan Çarkın gave a statement to the İstanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office in which he detailed that they had detained Abdülmecit Baskın in 1993 on the orders of İbrahim Şahin, the head of the Special Operations Department and that Baskın had been killed by special operations police officers Ziya Bandırmalıoğlu and Ayhan Akça. The public prosecutor’s and court records showed that Ayhan Çarkın’s accounts in his police, prosecutor’s and judge’s statements coincided exactly with the place descriptions, locations and crime scene reports.
Following Çarkın’s confessions, which the press also reported, a new investigation was launched into Abdülmecit Baskın, Behçet Cantürk and 17 other people whose names were mentioned in Çarkın’s statements, who were subjected to enforced disappearance or executed.
Following the investigation, a lawsuit was filed against 19 people, including Mehmet Ağar, İbrahim Şahin and Korkut Eken, at the Ankara 13th High Criminal Court in 2014 on the charge of “killing people within the scope of the activities of an armed organization formed to commit crimes.”
The case, publicly known as the Ankara JİTEM (Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-Terror Unit) case, was finalized on 13 December 2019 with the acquittal of all defendants.
The families appealed against the rulings of the local court. On 5 April 2021, the 1st Criminal Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Appeals overturned the acquittal verdict and sent the case to the Ankara 1st High Criminal Court. At the last hearing of the retrial on 26 May 2023, the defendants were again acquitted following the reversal of the Court of Appeal’s ruling.
On 26 February 2024, the 1st Criminal Chamber of the Ankara Regional Court of Justice completed its appeal against the second acquittal verdict and this time found the acquittal verdict justified. The court ruled for the murders of Behçet Cantürk and Abdülmecit Baskın to be dismissed due to the statute of limitations, while finding the acquittal verdict for the other murders was justified.
In his 160-page dissenting opinion against the 6-page decision signed by the chairperson Aslan Duru and member Nazım Bal, member Ayhan Altun said: “Mehmet Ağar and Korkut Eken established a group with the state’s means to create a climate of fear and to benefit financially from this climate of fear and political murders started to be committed during this period. It is clear from the phone conversations between Tarık Ümit and Mehmet Eymür who ordered these murders. Mehmet Ağar and Korkut Eken gave training for the murders. Patriotic civilians were recruited into these teams and trained them as well. All special operations police officers who were taken to the training camp have more than one unsolved murder file. The leader of this organization is Mehmet Ağar. In a state of law, police officers cannot buy silencers.”
As human rights defenders, we have been continuously expressing that the practice of “impunity” prevailing in the Turkish Judiciary in both the Ankara JİTEM case and similar cases that constitute crimes against humanity must come to an end.
Article 77 of the Turkish Penal Code clearly regulates this crime. Both domestic law and international conventions “guarantee” the right to life, but this extraordinary difference between written law and practice and the impunity armor provided to the perpetrators is the result of the fact that there is no rule of law in Turkey. As human rights defenders, we will continue to struggle until this practice of impunity and unlawfulness ends.
Human Rights Association