A Turkish court has upheld the life sentence without parole for Kurdish youth Mazlum İçli despite contradictory evidence.
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The Turkish Court of Cassation has upheld the life sentence without the possibility of parole handed down to Mazlum İçli, despite the contradictory evidence, İçli’s lawyer announced on Wednesday.
İçli, who was only 14 years old at the time, was accused of killing 17-year-old Yasin Börü and three other people during widespread street protests in Diyarbakır (Amed) and other Kurdish-majority cities in 2014, known as the ‘Kobane protests’.
Video footage, phone signals and eyewitness accounts proved that İçli was attending a wedding 140 kilometres away from where the victims lost their lives on the day of the incident.
The accusation against İçli was based on the testimony of an anonymous witness, yet, it was revealed that another defendant in the case, named by the same witness, was actually in prison on the date of the incident, proving that the testimony of the witness could not be sufficient to establish guilt.
Moreover, the anonymous witness later retracted the testimony, saying that it had been given under police pressure.
Despite the lack of concrete evidence implicating İçli in the crime, the court overlooked the solid evidence that would have exonerated him in its 2021 rule.
Kobane protests
The street protests began after the government refused to intervene in the Islamic State’s (ISIS) siege of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane, just metres across the Turkish border. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s comments at the time that the town was “about to fall” sparked outrage among Turkey’s Kurdish population and fanned the flames of violent protests.
The protests saw clashes between Turkey’s rival Kurdish movements, including the Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par), an Islamist political party, allied with Erdoğan, with a history of political violence and alleged links to the fundamentalist Hizbullah organisation in Turkey. Börü and the other three people killed during the protests were reportedly linked to the party.
According to a report by the independent Turkish Human Rights Association, 46 people died during the Kobani protests in October 2014. Official records recorded only 37 of the deaths.
Of the 41 people charged in the case of the killing of Börü and three others, 25 have received prison sentences. The other deaths, mostly of Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) supporters, were not investigated.
Lawyer alleges unjustified verdict and political motives
Lawyer Mahsuni Karaman, who announced the Court of Cassation’s decision on the social media platform known as X (formerly Twitter), emphasised that the court’s decision was unjustified. Karaman attributed the reason for the decision to the need for a “perpetrator” in order to convict Selahattin Demirtaş and other HDP members of “incitement” in the Kobane trial.
This interpretation by Karaman is related to the Kobane trial, in which 108 members of the pro-Kurdish HDP, including former co-chairs Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, are on trial, 18 of whom are in custody.
Following the protests, which turned violent and resulted in many deaths, the Turkish authorities accused the HDP of instigating the violence and began arresting members of the party, including prominent politicians. HDP co-chairs and officials at various levels were accused of instigating the violence and causing the deaths.
The prosecutor is seeking prison sentences of up to life imprisonment for the defendants on 29 different charges, including murder, looting, wounding a public official with a firearm, burning flags and disrupting the country’s national unity and integrity.
The deaths during the protests, including that of 17-year-old Börü, are also an important part of the closure case against the HDP.
