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Journalist killed when Turkish police
fired on Kurdish demonstrators
13.4.2006
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Reporters Without Borders voiced shock
today at the news that Ilyas Aktas, a young, unpaid
journalist with the far-left fortnightly Devrimci
Demokrasi (Revolutionary Democracy), has been
declared brain-dead by the doctors who have been
treating him for the gunshot wound he received on 30
March in the southeastern (Turkey-Kurdistan) city of
Diyarbakir.
Aktas, who had been working as the newspaper’s
correspondent in the region for two months, was shot
while covering a demonstration in support of 14
Kurdish rebels who had been killed a few days
earlier by Turkish troops. The newspaper’s editor,
Erdal Guler, said witnesses told him Aktas was hit
when police opened fire on the crowd of
demonstrators.
Guler has issued two releases about Aktas’s steadily
deteriorating condition since the shooting. Doctors
told the family on 9 April that he was now in an
irreversible coma, in other words, that he was
brain-dead.
“We are extremely shocked by this act of violence
and we express our deep sadness to the victim’s
family,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We
encourage the family to file a complaint so that an
investigation can determine as quickly as possible
the exact responsibility of the security forces in
Aktas’s clinical death. The authorities must shed
light on this case, in which it is hard to establish
what happened because of the confusion surrounding
it.”
Members of the Devrimci Demokrasi staff told
Reporters Without Borders that Aktas was threatened
by the police on 29 March, a day before the
shooting, as he was helping a child who had been
shot during a demonstration. A policeman allegedly
told him : “We know you. Take care. You will see.”
The newspaper said in one of its statements that the
family had accused doctors of neglecting Aktas and
of leaving him unattended on a stretcher for 24
hours.
Violence broke out on 28 March in Diyarbakir, the
largest city in this mainly Kurdish area, where
there have been repeated protests since 14 rebels of
the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK/Kongra-Gel) - the
former PKK - were killed by the army. Twelve people
were killed in the rioting, which then spread to
Istanbul. Three more people were killed in Istanbul
when masked pro-PKK demonstrators threw a Molotov
cocktail at a bus. Rumours have meanwhile circulated
of the Turkish army using chemical weapons in its
operations.
Cameraman Sakir Uygar of the pro-Kurdish news agency
Diha also sustained a gunshot wound during the same
30 March demonstration in Diyarbakir that Aktas
attended. He suffered tibia and fibula fractures and
had to undergo an operation in which doctors
installed a plate. In the course of the
disturbances, demonstrators threw stones at the
headquarters of the newspaper Batman in the nearby
city of Batman, breaking windows.
Metin Göktepe, a photographer with the far-left
daily Evrensel, was arrested by anti-riot police for
“talking too much” at a roadblock near Istanbul on 8
January 1996 as he was returning from the funeral of
two political prisoners killed in jail. The police
beat him badly several times and then left him,
without getting him any treatment for his injuries,
from which he died later that day.
A total of 48 police officers were charged in the
course of an interior ministry investigation into
the case. At least 11 of them were suspected of
being directly involved in Göktepe’s death. The
trial last several years. On 20 January 2000, the
supreme court upheld sentences of seven and a half
years for five policemen convicted of “involuntary
homicide.”
www.rsf.org
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