The governor of Turkish southeastern province of Mardin said a Kurdish man who died of fatal wounds on 1 September was the victim of a gun that had “gone off when a police officer had tripped,” Mezopotamya News Agency reported on Sunday.
Adem Kara (21) is the latest of many Kurdish people who have lost their lives at the hands of the Turkish authorities, in incidents that are often passed off as accidents.
Kara was seriously wounded on 1 September, when a policeman who tried to detain him allegedly shot him as he was “running away”. Kara was fatally wounded and later died in hospital.
Witnesses confirmed that Kara was running away, but claimed that three shots were fired. A police officer was taken into custody in relation to the incident.
The Governor of Mardin, Mahmut Demirtaş, made a statement about the incident two days after Kara’s death. The governor said that the officer’s gun had “gone off because he had tripped on a paving stone”.
This is not the first case in which a police officer has ‘accidentally’ killed someone under Demirtaş’s watch. When he was the governor of Adana in 2020, he claimed that a Syrian man was killed accidentally by a police officer when he started running away, disobeying the policeman who ordered him to stop. According to the policeman, his gun went off when he stumbled and fell to the ground.
Between 2007 and 2020, 403 people, including 93 children, were killed by the police in public-order-related incidents, according to a report prepared by the Baran Tursun Foundation, an organisation that monitors police violence.
According to Mehmet Dursun, the head of the foundation, a 2007 change in Turkish law that extended the powers of police forces to use firearms to quell dissent is largely to blame for these incidents.
Mithat Sancar, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), said that people were losing their lives “either by police bullets or, mainly children, being hit by armoured cars,” during a statement he made in Mardin straight after Kara was shot.
“There is a direct connection between these [deaths] and the arbitrary management and military mentality in the approach to the Kurdish Question. They believe that security forces carrying out such actions will remain unpunished. The culture of impunity makes such painful incidents happen more frequently,” Sancar said.
