Recusation of Joint Attorneys in JİTEM Case

In the trial against Kayseri Regiment Commander Colonel Cemal Temizöz the Diyarbakır 6^th High Criminal Court decided to follow a request to recuse the joint attorneys.

Temizöz and Kamil Atağ, his son Tamer Atağ, confessors Adem Yakin, Hıdır Altuğ and Fırat Altın (Abdulhakim Güven) are tried in the conetxt of 22 unsolved murder cases between 1993 and 1996, when Temizöz was gendarmerie commander in Cizre, a district in the Kurdish-majority province of Şırnak in the southeast of Turkey. Temizöz is a former commander of the clandestine and illegal Gendarmerie Intelligence Anti-Terrorism Unit (JİTEM).

The president judge had lawyers Nail Karaarslan, Sezgin Tanrıkulu and Bahattin Özdemir expelled from the court room after Tanrıkulu reacted incommensurably when Karaarslan addressed him colloquially in an inappropriate personal style. Özdemir had claimed to keep their insertions off the records.

Joint Attorneys rejected court and court clerk

According to information from the online edition of Radikal newspaper, Tanrıkulu addressed the court president as follows before he was expelled from the court room: "Since the beginning of the hearing you are indulging the suspects. You do not show the same indulgence for us and our clients. Do your work and document everything".

The court ordered a break upon the tensions. After the intermittence the court rejected Tanrıkulu's and Özdemir's objections. The request for the joint attorney's recusation on the grounds of their doubts about a sound and unbiased conduction of the case was brought before the court. The court clerk keeping the records was also among the people suspected by the joint attorneys to be biased.

File transferred to superior court

The judges accepted the claim for the recusation of the joint attorneys and decreed to hand the file to the Diyarbakır 4^th High Criminal Court in order to obtain a decision accordingly.

"The Kukel attack was launched and my father was shot with a Kalashnikov"

This is the statement of İsmet Uykur, son of Ramazan Uykur who was killed in 1994:

"A white [Renault ] Toros came. Defendant Tamer Atak got off the car and told my father to get in. When my father refused to enter the car and continued walking, they blocked his way 50 meters ahead by moving the car to the sidewalk. Tamer left the car with a gun in his hand. When a fight started between the two, Kukel Atak got off the car. He shot my father with his Kalashnikov and they left. I was so afraid and shocked that I could not go to the scene. Some of the people around ran away out of fear, others closed their shutters to turn away from the incident. There were two more people in the car but I could not see their faces. I am a complainant and I want to know why my father was killed. Çizre was ruled by fear at those times. It was not sure who killed whom and people were worried about their own lives. Nobody filed any complaints back then. They were afraid that something would happen to them if they did so. I knew the defendants would be protected. We were afraid because we knew they were working together with the gendarmerie".

Temizöz denies connection to Hasan Ergül

Besides, Temizöz declared in his statement to the prosecutor that he did not know Hasan Ergül who was killed 14 years ago. (EÖ/VK)