New information was disclosed in the statements provided by the assassin Onur Gencer at the police station. According to Mezopotamya Agency, Gencer stated that HDP Co-Chair Pervin Buldan, HDP former Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş, Turkey Worker’s Party (TİP) Deputy Barış Atay and HDP ex-MP Leyla Zana were among his targets.
Since 2019, a group of mothers began a sit-in protest in front of the HDP’s Diyarbakır (Amed) headquarters, demanding to be reunited with their sons and daughters whom they claimed the HDP has abducted and sent away to join the PKK. Many political commentators have speculated whether the Justice and Development Party (AKP) asked those families to blame the HDP and get them to start the sit-in in front of the HDP Party building. During the beginning of the sit-in actions, HDP’s deputy Ayşe Acar Başaran said: “It must be known that the cause of children ending up in the mountains or in prison, the cause of thousands of young men and women being murdered, lies in the government’s insistence on war policies.”
In his statement at the police station, Gencer stated that he was impressed by the families sitting in protest in front of the HDP building in Diyarbakir. “Also, while I was researching on Google at that time, the images of the innocent families whose children the HDP party mediated in the abduction of their children by the PKK, impressed me. I began to think more strongly that I was right in my decision,” he reportedly stated.
It was revealed that Gencer shared a photo amongst various groups after he murdered Deniz Poyraz. He explained the reason why he shared the photo: “I aimed to kill people whom I thought were PKK members. I thought they would come to the party building when they saw this photo. I would like to state that I share this by thinking of it as TOTEM.”
Stating that he received shooting training at two different shooting ranges, Gencer said, “I have a hobby of pistol shooting and since 2016, I used to go to shoot whenever I had the opportunity. Twenty to thirty, maybe more this way: I went to the shooting range called Ege Private Security, where security guards are trained, in Çiğili, and to the shooting range called Polygon İzmir in Kemalpaşa.”
He also reportedly stated that he learned the terms “internal reconnaissance” and “external reconnaissance” from Turkish Armed Forces’ military personnel while he was working in Manbij, Syria.
Gencer said, “It is true: these terms were the terms I heard from the military personnel I worked with during my stay in Mambij, Syria. Soldiers used to talk to each other about the operations they had experienced while talking among themselves, and I liked them too. Since I learned what they mean from their expressions there, I used these words too.”
