Abdurrahman Karabulut, the lawyer for a Kurdish family, seven of whose members were murdered in the central Turkish province of Konya last Friday, has said he has been receiving death threats for representing the family, the JinNews news agency reported on Tuesday.
Karabulut said someone called his office while he was away, talked to his secretary and told her to convey a message to him, which was: “We will get you. Your time will come, too. We will kill you.”
Seven members of the Dedeoğlu family were killed Friday by assailants who tried to burn their house down in the Meram district of Konya. Some family members had been seriously injured in another attack in May by neighbors who warned them that they “will not let Kurds live here.”
Karabulut said he was made a target by politicians from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Konya governor, who argued that the attack was not racially motivated but rather due to a family feud.
He said he has been receiving insults and death threats from various social media accounts but that he is determined to pursue the case to completion.
Karabulut is preparing to file criminal complaints against the people who issued death threats.
Following the attack, government officials had dismissed racist motives as the main factor behind it, saying instead that it was committed because of old hostilities between two families. Critics of the ruling AKP, on the other hand, argued that the AKP’s discriminatory and polarizing rhetoric is responsible for the increase in violence targeting Kurds in the country.
Jailed former co-chair of the HDP Selahattin Demirtaş also held the government’s discriminatory policies and its rhetoric targeting various segments of society responsible for the attack.