Turkey: Father given the bones of his son in a sack after seven years of his death

A Kurdish protester’s bones who was killed during the curfew in the Sur district of Turkey’s southeastern Diyarbakir were handed in a sack to his father after seven years of waiting, Mezopotamya Agency reported. 

In February last year, when excavators in Diyarbakir came across some bones that could have been buried there during the clashes of 2015-2016, father Ali Riza Aslan applied to courthouse believing the bones could belong to his son, since he already knew he was buried near that place. 

When he tested  a 60 percent DNA match with his son’s remains, the father was told a test from the mother was also needed. Finally on 18 November of 2021, the family proved the bones belonged to their son with a 95 percent DNA match, but it tıook ten months for the father to receive his son’s remains, and he was handed them in a sack. 

Diyarbakir Bar Association filed charges against the personnel in Diyarbakir courthouse saying the act was an “insult to the memory of a person.”

After a two-year ceasefire between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party)  and Turkish state fell apart in July 2015, the PKK militants set up barricades and digged trenches to keep security forces away, but a brutal response from the army and police left hundreds of protesters dead after tanks and artillery hit the city centers of Kurdish towns for weeks.