The Turkish Justice Ministry has announced that it has “no information” regarding an investigation into the killing of a Kurdish woman whose body was left lying in the street for a week after she was shot to death by security forces during curfews in southeastern Turkey in 2015, the Mezopotamya news agency reported on Tuesday.
Turkish authorities imposed curfews in towns and districts to flush out outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants from urban areas in Turkey’s southeast between July 2015 and February 2017, when thousands of people, including women, children and the elderly, were trapped in their homes and serious human rights violations took place, according to rights groups.
Taybet İnan, 57, was shot by security forces in armored vehicles in front of her house in the Silopi district of the predominantly Kurdish-populated Şırnak province on December 19, 2015. Her body remained lying in the street for seven days before it was finally taken to Şırnak State Hospital for an autopsy on December 25.
The case has seen little progress despite ongoing inquiries and an application filed at the Constitutional Court. No official has been put on trial related to the woman’s killing.
Nevroz Uysal Aslan, a Şırnak MP from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), on Tuesday told Mezopotamya that the Justice Ministry had provided no information about the case in its response to the lawmaker’s inquiry submitted on December 19, 2023.
“Our ministry has no information about the nature of the actions taken during the investigation, which is being conducted secretly and falls under judicial activities,” the MP cited the ministry as saying.
Aslan criticized the ministry’s claim of “no information,” stating that there was no confidentiality order on the case, adding that an application regarding İnan was submitted to the Constitutional Court in 2022, with the court requesting a written statement from the ministry. The ministry shared detailed information about the investigation into İnan’s murder with the top court, Aslan said.
According to the lawmaker, İnan died at the location where she was shot, and law enforcement prevented anyone from removing her body for seven days. When her husband, Halit İnan, and her brother-in-law, Yusuf İnan, tried to retrieve her body, they were shot at by snipers. Halit İnan was wounded, while Yusuf İnan was killed.
“Nine years have passed without an effective investigation or prosecution into either Taybet İnan’s death or the fact that her body was left in the street,” Aslan said, interpreting this as the state’s effort to obscure the murder.
According to a report by Turkish human rights organization Mazlumder, more than 200 people were killed and over 10,000 houses were destroyed in the Cizre district of Şırnak alone during curfews that were imposed after July 2015.
In February 2019 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) declined to consider a complaint regarding curfew incidents in Cizre on the grounds that domestic legal remedies had not yet been exhausted.