A 22-year old Kurdish man arrested in northwest Turkey is being charged with membership of a terrorist organisation on the basis of a 10-year-old photograph, Artı Gerçek reported.
Ahmet Sayhan, who is originally from Mardin province in southeast Turkey, became the latest example of police arrests based on bizarre evidence, such as wearing a red, yellow and green shawl, singing in Kurdish or simply using the word “Kurdistan”.
When Sayhan went to work in Gemlik, in the western province of Bursa on Saturday, he was summoned to the company offices. After some time passed and he did not return, his workmates contacted the company officials who told them he had been arrested by plain-clothed police.
The police took Sayhan to Gemlik Court House in connection with an inquiry going on in Mardin. At the Court House, he was accused of being the man holding a firearm in a photograph, and charged with being a member of a terrorist organisation on the basis of this. He had to make a statement by video link to the prosecutor in Mardin investigating the photograph.
The photograph in question is said to have been taken in 2012, and is of a man holding a firearm. Sayhan, who was 12 years of age when the photograph was taken, pointed out that the man in the 10-year-old picture was clearly already over 20 years old.
Nevertheless, he was remanded in custody and sent to Bursa H-Type Closed Prison.
This not an isolated incident. There is the recent high-profile case of the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP Semra Güzel, who was photographed in 2014 in the company of a known PKK member, stripped of her parliamentary immunity on March this year and arrested at the beginning of September. At the time that that photograph was taken, the Turkish government was in actually peace talks with the PKK.
