On the night of August 5th , Tarik Birlesik, a local resident who is also the president of Kızıltepe Gallery Owners Site was subjected to insults and violence by Turkish police during ‘radio criminal record check’ questioning at a police checkpoint in the Kızıltepe district of Mardin. There were 6 other people in the car with Birlesik, including 3 children, when the incident happened.
The incident began right after Birlesik reacted to police insulting other people in another vehicle at the checkpoint. Birlesik was also beaten by police who insulted saying amongst other things “I am the state, you are a bunch of dogs.” Meanwhile the car Birlesik was then shot at by the Special Operations Police with an assault rifle while the children were in the car, MA reports.
Luckily, no one in the vehicle was injured but Tarik Birlesik and his brother Ramazan Birlesik were also detained. The Birlesik brothers were released with a travel ban by the court and are being charged with ‘resisting arrest’ by the police. They have filed a criminal complaint against the police.
MA spoke to the Tarik Birlesik and his lawyer Azad Abdan about the incident.
“Special Operations Police fired about six or seven times at my vehicle. 10 or 15 Operations Police surrounded us, pulled me and my brother out of the car and said unspeakable things to us. They also said, “You’re terrorists. We will kill you!” They put me down and handcuffed me from behind.”
He protests the attitude against them : “Let the whole world hear my voice. They are only so cruel against us Kurds ”
When the Birlesik brothers were attacked by the police, the lawyer Azat Abdan immediately arrived at the scene. He noted that the first thing the police asked them was to seek a compromise since they knew that they had done something wrong
“They tried to cover up the incident, we didn’t let them, they tried to falsify documentation, we witnessed 10 or 20 of them gathered around and discussing how to prepare the report, we saw 3-4 times they prepared a report and ripped up the papers.” he continues: “The whole country has turned out to be a police state. We have filed a criminal complaint about the police.” Lawyer Abdan also states that the CCTV records confirms the Birlesik brothers statements and that the police are actually lying.
“It has been exposed that their [police] statements are not true.”
