There has been no significant progress in the court case of the murder of Deniz Poyraz, a Kurdish political activist, a year after she was killed in the branch offices of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey’s western city of Izmir on 17 June 2021.
Meanwhile, her father Abdullah Poyraz has been prosecuted for things he is alleged to have said in an interview after his daughter was killed. He is accused of making propaganda for a terrorist group, the prosecution is demanding a sentence of four and a half years imprisonment.
In Deniz’s murder case, the man who was caught red-handed in the scene of crime is accused of deliberate killing, but the prosecution’s approach to the case has excluded the possibility that the murder might have been an organised act rather than an individual one, or that there may have been others who instigated the murder.
The attitude of the accused Onur Gencer in court demonstrated his confidence, when he said in the second hearing on 24 January that he had no regrets for having stormed the HDP’s offices and committed the murder.
At a commemoration held by the HDP on Friday in Izmir, Saruhan Oluç, MP and HDP’s deputy parliamentary group chair, asked:
“Who are the clandestine groups within the state supporting him? Who was it that encouraged him? Was it SADAT*, trainer of assassins and bombers, under the protection of the political administration? Was it they who trained that murderer? Did that murderer fight in Syria in the ranks of the Islamic State? Did he fight in the ranks of the Free Syrian Army, Al-Nusra, or Tahrir al-Sham? The authorities are not responding to these questions.”
* SADAT is a Turkish private military consultancy company whose mission remains shrouded in controversy, and which is alleged to serve the Turkish political administration in covert operations at home and abroad .
