A 23-year-old student named Abdulgaffar Dayan was run over by an armoured vehicle on his way to college in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority city of Cizre (Cizîr) on Monday.
Dayan was seriously injured in the incident, suffering from internal bleeding, but permission was not given for him to be taken to the hospital for treatment until after a substantial delay. Meanwhile, the Ranger-type armoured vehicle was found to be a police vehicle.
According to local sources, witnesses saw Dayan being dragged about 50 metres along the ground after the impact. While police blocked the traffic around the scene, a number of other armoured vehicles immediately arrived.
Dayan was reported to have been kept lying on the road for 40 minutes, during which time the police refused to allow him to be taken to hospital by anyone even though he was in need of urgent medical attention and an ambulance had arrived.
The witnesses also stated that damage to the front of the vehicle from the crash indicated how hard Dayan had been hit.
According to a report by the Human Rights Association (IHD) of Turkey, 42 individuals, 20 of them children, were killed by armoured police or military vehicles in Kurdish-majority provinces within the last 13 years.
Miraç Miroğlu, a seven-year-old boy was killed by an armoured vehicle on 3 September 2021 as he was riding his bike near his home in the city of Silopi (Girkê Amo).
The report of the investigation into the case of Miraç said that the accident occured because the boy ‘was negligent in not complying with a stop sign, and kept going, colliding with an official vehicle.’
