Lawyer says murderer’s links were darkened during trial

Many aspects were darkened in a trial case of a man who killed a member of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) last year, an intervening lawyer said.

The accused, Onur Gencer was sentenced on Tuesday by a Turkish court to aggravated life imprisonment for premeditated killing, but the links behind the murder has been left uninvestigated.

Gencer had been caught in the crime scene along with the murder weapon after he stormed the party's offices in the western city of Izmir and shot Deniz Poyraz, a young HDP member.

No action was taken against the law enforcement officers with whom the accused was related, only one percent of the digital data was examined, and those who should be accused were heard as witnesses, lawyer Turkan Aslan Agac said, in an interview with arti gercek’s Remzi Budancir.

Lawyers found out that the accused often went to a shooting range and received weapons training there, so they asked the prosecution to investigate his contacts in the facility, adding many contacts to the case file. But the prosecutors failed to call most of them to testify.

“75 percent of the people who had information could not be heard. We could not listen to the people who had training in the range or the owners,” Agac said.

Agac said that a large amount of digital evidence was seized on Gencer and at his home, but the court limited the examination of the evidence only to June 17, the date of the murder.

“The data should have been submitted to the file in its integrity and should have been examined comprehensively. It is not possible to understand which criteria were used while searching the data by the 'Cyber and Anti-Terrorism Department,' from the limited report they submitted to the file,” Agac said.

“We do not know what they have eliminated and what they have not, since they do not present them in an integrated manner in the content provided. We wanted to know this. After all, we know that this was organized. We should have been given the opportunity to choose and evaluate within those data.”