Death threats to left-wing youths

Ozan Çepni
 
The abuse over the telephone that left-leaning students in Ankara have been suffering for some time has turned into threats of “execution” purporting to come from the police. In the latest incident, two days ago three young university students spent hours of horror due to threatening phone calls and people and cars with tinted windows waiting in front of their home. The young people, who were able to leave their home after their friends ran to the police station and came to their home accompanied by police officers and HDP Deputy Group Chair Ahmet Yıldırım called Ankara Police Directorate and reported the incident, described their experiences to Cumhuriyet.
 
“We will also pick up your big sister and we will kill her.”
 
One of the young people who claim to have received death threats, T.G., said, “People who described themselves as being police officers called my brother and said, ‘We will also pick up your big sister and we will kill her.’ That evening one of our friends’ fathers called to say, ‘Get out of that flat at once, at least you get out of that flat, son. They’re going to execute the people in that flat. They’re going to kill everyone. If you don’t get out, they’ll kill you, too’.” The caller, who also phoned his father, was supposedly someone named “Mehmet” who said he served at Ankara Counterterrorism Branch. He continued, “When we looked outside after the phone call, we saw that a person was watching the flat. He did not go away despite noticing that we had seen him. Then a Şahin make car came. They spoke to the person hanging around at the door and then parked 50 metres further on. Another black car came. We couldn’t see who was inside because it had tinted windows. One person also got of it. He spoke to the person watching the flat and moved on and waited like the other car. One person kept on threatening us by waving his finger. And we informed our friends and HDP MPs.”
 
T.G., indicating that the friends they had informed went to the police station, said, “They tried to get police officers from the police station and come. Then an official police car came in front of our flat. They spoke to the person waiting in front of the door and one person got out of the car. Then the police car left after having spoken to them. And the people who were watching the flat got away by concealing themselves in the gap between blocks. We then saw the other cars disperse. Then an official police car came with our friends. There was no procedure they could conduct and no record was taken.” The youths, leaving the flat accompanied by police officers and their lawyers, made a criminal complaint in which they also reported the numbers from which they had been phoned.
 
HDP Deputy Group Chair Ahmet Yıldırım, in turn, after having learnt of the incident, said, “We may have prevented a disaster in which these young people would have been taken from their flat with the knowledge of provincial police officials and police officers at the police station.”