Ceylan Önkol was killed in an explosion on Sept. 28 while tending sheep in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, in the village of Şenlik, located in Lice. Deputy Ufuk Uras' wife, artist Zeynep Tanbay, made a statement in front of the İstanbul Courthouse in Sultanahmet yesterday, speaking on behalf of a group including artists Lale Mansur and İlkay Akkaya that filed the criminal complaint. “We are not prosecutors, judges, ministers or the state; we are citizens with consciences and a sense of justice,” she said.
Tanbay stated that the group had observed what the state, the government and the justice system had and had not done since Önkol's death and said they had filed a criminal complaint against the prosecutor assigned to the case because “the prosecutor did not travel to the scene of the crime due to the risk entailed, gave permission for uninformed persons to perform an autopsy at the police station, charged Ceylan's family with bringing evidence from the place that [the prosecutor] would not travel to himself and hiding the case file from lawyers for days.”
“We are filing a criminal complaint not just against the prosecutor but also the authorities at the Interior Ministry and General Staff, who failed to begin an investigation in a timely manner and did not provide any satisfying statement on the topic to the public,” Tanbay said. After Tanbay spoke, the group submitted petitions detailing charges of misuse of authority and obscuring physical evidence.
