GENEVA – A young medicine student, Ms Nursena Kücükozyigit, has been desperately seeking for her father missing in Ankara since 29 December 2020 and asking help through her Twitter account @NeredeBabam .
Nursena states that “She last talked to her father on the phone at 15:40 on 29th December. He promised to come to visit them in Kocaeli where they live with her mother and to spend his New Year’s eve together. Since then she could not receive any news from him and does not know his whereabout. She could not since then receive any information from the law enforcement and prosecution authorities. The movement and circulation of her father’s car can easily be traced through MOBESE cameras set up everywhere in Ankara. Three different police officers, however, have given contradictory replies regarding his father’s missing car. Even though she gave her father’s latest cell phone number, the police entered in the docket the old one her father had used ten years ago”. Nursena applied to the police and prosecutor in Kocaeli province and to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Ankara. But no meaningful investigatory steps appear to have been taken. Nursena indicates that despite 29 days has already passed so far even a prosecutor has not been assigned to the complaint they had filed and no authority has tried to collect the available camera recordings present at the stores surrounding the building of his father’s office.
Two deputies from different opposition parties, Mr Sezgin Tanrıkulu and Mr Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, submitted parliamentary questions concerning the allegations about the missing of Mr Kucukozyigit.
It is reported that 32 Turkish citizens have been forcefully disappeared in Turkey over the last four years. Some of them are still missing while some have reappeared in police custody after their absences of six to nine months. Two of them revealed at the court the torture they endured.
In its latest report ( https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/45/13/Add.4) the the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances expressed its particular concern over the allegations of enforced disappearances reported to have been perpetrated under the pretext of combatting terrorism against actual or perceived members of Gulen/Hizmet movement. The Working Group called Turkey in its report to investigate as a matter of urgency the distressing reports of abductions by state agents in broad daylight, followed by months of torture and ill-treatment in clandestine detention sites aimed at extracting confessions for future prosecutions.
Hüseyin Galip Kucukozyigit, purged from his job as chief legal counsel at the Turkish Prime Ministry Office following the July 15, 2016 coup attempt and sentenced to 6 years’ and 3 months’ imprisonment on account of his alleged links with Gulen/Hizmet movement appears to have been the latest victim of these abductions. Authorities’ inaction and silence over the serious allegations raised by the family since the day of his missing has raises the suspicion of involvement of state officials.
Our differences do matter, but our common humanity matters more.
Bill clinton
