Accused Perpetrators Released in Malatya Murder Trial
By Jeremy Reynalds, Senior Correspondent. jeremyreynalds@gmail.com
A Turkish criminal court has
released two former military officers and an Islamic university
researcher who had been jailed for nearly four years on suspected
involvement in the 2007 murders of three Christians in southeast Turkey.
According to a story by
Barbara G. Baker for World Watch Monitor, at the Jan 21 hearing, the
Malatya First High Criminal Court ruled that the three men – Ret. Col.
Mehmet Ulger, Maj. Haydar Yesil and Ruhi Abat -- be set free pending the
conclusion of the trial.
“This is a huge shame, that
leaves us without much hope,” said Protestant church leader Umut Sahin,
who was present when the court’s ruling was announced. “Unfortunately,
we expect the case will drag on now for at least another year.”
“We were not at all
surprised,” plaintiff lawyer Erdal Dogan told World Watch Monitor
shortly after the panel of three judges and two prosecutors announced
its decision.
He noted that political manipulation had changed the direction of the case over the past 12 months.
Together with Ret. Gen. Hursit
Tolon, the accused mastermind of the murders who was set free last
June, the newly released suspects now claim the deadly plot was
orchestrated by the government’s former-ally-turned-nemesis, the Hizmet
movement led by Muslim scholar Fetullah Gulen.
The day before the Malatya
hearing, Gulen’s lawyer, Nuruallah Albayrak, issued a statement accusing
the Turkish government of “trying to heap unsolved murders” on Gulen
and his movement.
World Watch Monitor said
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has labeled this an illegal “parallel”
conspiracy trying to overthrow the ruling Justice and Development Party.
On the witness stand
Wednesday, defendant Abat testified that the accusations against him
were “disinformation” devised by the parallel state, stressing, “I am
with President Erdogan to the end, and I will always support him.’
Met by his family and local
journalists as he left the prison that evening with his fellow
defendants, Abat declared that they had been arrested "in a dirty plot."
With Wednesday’s release of
Ulger, Yesil and Abat, all but one of 20 of the men jailed in March 2011
on charges of planning the Malatya killings are now released on
probation.
World Watch Monitor said they
are banned by court order from leaving the country until the completion
of the trial. The last of the 20 is jailed in another city on a separate
case.
Life sentences without parole
have been demanded for the five men accused of carrying out the plot.
They were released under house arrest in March 2014 and fitted with
tracking devices.
The drawn-out Malatya trial
has now spanned more than seven years, with the 8th anniversary of the
brutal stabbing deaths of Turkish Christians Necati Aydin and Ugur
Yuksel and German Tilmann Geske to be commemorated on April 18.
Hearings are scheduled to resume in the trial on Feb. 18.
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