, the youth wing of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the Deutsche Welle Turkish edition reported.){kind=link}
A Turkish prosecutor has accused 22 people of the premeditated murder of Sinan Ateş, an academic and the former president of the Grey Wolves (Ülkü Ocakları), the youth wing of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the Deutsche Welle Turkish edition reported.
The 38-year-old Ateş was fatally shot in the capital city of Ankara on December 30, 2022. His murder in broad daylight sent shockwaves across the country, sparking a debate about the power struggles within the country’s nationalists.
The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office completed the investigation into the murder of Ateş one year and four months later and drafted an indictment. The indictment, which accuses 22 people of “premeditated murder,” was sent to the Ankara 31st High Criminal Court on Monday.
The court has 15 days to accept the indictment.
A total of 22 suspects have been arrested as part of the investigation so far, including Eray Özyağcı, who fired the gun during the attack; the Grey Wolves President Ahmet Yiğit Yıldırım’s private secretary Emre Yüksel; former Grey Wolves executive Tolgahan Demirbaş; lawyer Serdar Öktem from the MHP; Ufuk Köktürk, the MHP’s İstanbul provincial executive; and special operations police officers Aşkın Mert Gelenbey and Murat Can Çolak.
The Grey Wolves are seen as the paramilitary wing of the MHP, an ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and their ideology is mainly based on Turkish nationalism. Therefore, Kurds, Armenians and other minorities in Turkey have occasionally been their targets.
In 2020 France officially banned the Grey Wolves after a center dedicated to the memory of those who died in the mass killings of Armenians during World War I was defaced with graffiti, including the name of the Grey Wolves.
The German government has faced an intensified public campaign in favor of banning the Turkish nationalist group since then.
In 2021 the European Parliament called on the European Union and its member states to examine the possibility of adding the Grey Wolves to the EU terrorist list.
In its 2019-2020 report prepared by Turkey rapporteur Nacho Sanchez Amor, the EP voiced concerns about the group, saying it was expanding to worrying levels not only in Turkey but also in EU countries.