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After a police officer purposefully reversed his car and ran over a lawyer in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority city of Şırnak (Sirnex) reportedly confessing that he did it intentionally, the chair of the Şırnak Bar Association said in a public statement on Monday that the incident was a clear indication that none of the lawyers in the city were safe.
Lawyer Serkan Karakaş, the head of the Bar’s centre for lawyers’ rights, was seriously injured on Sunday when a police officer, driving at speed in reverse after having spotted him, ran over him. The police officer later bizarrely said while in detention that he’d acted on instructions of some strange voices that had encouraged him, and that he wasn’t feeling psychologically well.
Rojhat Dilsiz and a group of lawyers, made an announcement on Monday, calling upon the authorities to take the police officer into custody, and to carry out a comprehensive criminal investigation in a transparent manner.
Dilsiz said:
“The incident in which one of our colleagues, a representative of the defence council that constitutes one of the founding elements of the judiciary, was targeted, shows that none of our lives are secure.”
He continued:
“While this incident is not the first attack against lawyers and against our profession, it appears that it will unfortunately not be the last one either. This is neither an occasional nor individual accident, nor is the result of some coincidence. Here we have a police officer who claims that he acted on audible commands coming from nowhere; someone who didn’t refrain from taking action to actually try to kill someone. Having such an officer in service is a high risk and danger for the whole of society.”
Dilsiz urged the Turkish ministry of the interior to immediately discharge the police officer from service.
