Second hearing to be held of case over suspicious death in prison

Photo: Mezopotamya Agency

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The second hearing of the case over the death of 28-year-old Yılmaz Ekinci will be held on March 28. Ekinci died on January 13, 2022, in Aydın E Type Prison and the prison administration claimed he committed suicide. But his images were revealed later being forcefully taken to the short stay unit.

Five guardians are standing trial for abuse of authority at the Aydın 1st penal court of first instance.

Murat Birgül, who is one of the witnesses said that he was in the prison cell one day before the event and that he woke up to screams at 3 am, Tolga Güney from the Mezopotamya Agency reported.

Birgül looked through the embrasure, "the friends in cells no. 1 and 2 also looked and we wanted to do something. The guardians closed our embrasures. After the guardians were gone, I called out and asked who the new coming was. Yılmaz Ekinci answered me and told me his name. He did not want to talk because the guardians had beaten him. 'Let's speak later,' he said. And I slept," told the Birgül the MA correspondent.

"The guardian makes a hush sign"

The witness also said that the next day he witnessed  Yılmaz Ekinci asking Aydın, the head of the guardians not to take him to the cell upstairs, saying that nobody could stay in such a place.

He heard Aydın saying, "You will be staying upstairs like a dog." Birgül described that later he was not able to see them but that he heard six of them beating Yılmaz. And then he heard a flump sound from upstairs. He knows the cell upstairs where he also stayed earlier and he thinks that most probably they pushed Ekinci in, where he fell down and hit the floor or the bed. "The guardian with curly hair made a hush sign to me when they were coming downstairs," Birgül told MA.

Birgül called out to Ekinci upstairs once again when the person who brings their meal opened his embrasure, but he was not able to get an answer. The person bringing the meal went up and he told the guardian "His nose is bleeding."

The guardian went up then and called the health worker who told Ekinci's neck was broken. The guardian asked if it was possible to give him cpr, but the health worker said no, cpr can't be done in this case. 

"Nobody can kill himself there"

Birgül told MA, "I stayed in that cell before. It is not possible for any person to hang himself there." He described the physical conditions of the cell and told that the place the prison administration claims he hanged himself is only 1 meter and 20 cm above the floor. He states Yılmaz Ekinci was 1 meter and 70 centimeters tall. He also says, "Yılmaz was not a person who would commit suicide" and adds that they were not allowed to have shoestrings with them, since it is being claimed that Ekinci used them to hang himself. 

After Birgül gave his statement to the prosecutor and was a witness in the case over Ekinci's death, he was sued for insulting the guardians.

He applied to be transferred to another hospital which was accepted and he is now in the Şakran Prison.

* According to the 2022 Report on Violations of Rights in Prisons in the Marmara Region by the İstanbul branch of the Human Rights Association, 140 rights violations concerning the right to life took place in 2022 in the prisons in this region of Turkey, 78 of which involved death.

(AS/PE)