The new Turkey
Client O.D

2-apr-19

Cases of Torture Based on Information Received from Lawyers Human Rights Watch spoke to five lawyers who shared their observations about abuses against their 5 clients (cases 6-10) and other detainees in police custody in Ankara in April and May 2017, on suspicion of links with the alleged Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ). We also spoke to another lawyer in central Anatolia about abuses against his client accused of links to the PKK in March 2017. The clients are all in pretrial detention, so Human Rights Watch was unable to speak to them directly.

Another case reported to Human Rights Watch was that of O.D., 30, a civil servant who had been dismissed from his position by state of emergency decree. Lawyer D told Human Rights Watch:

Our client O.D. was detained on April 26 at the Ankara Anti-Terror Branch, and then held at the Smuggling and Organized Crime Branch. I visited him twice, and there was a police officer present throughout, except for a few moments during the first visit when my client was able to tell me that he and the other detainees there had been tortured. I didn't see any marks on him at that meeting. He was very nervous. I visited a second time to deliver
clothes to him from his family. The court remanded him to Sincan F-1 [prison] on May 5. My client had previously been detained in November

2016 and released by the court under judicial control, which meant he had to regularly sign in at the police station.38

According to the court transcript, when brought before the Ankara Judge of the Criminal Peace No. 3 who remanded him to pretrial detention on May 5, O.D. rejected the accusations against him, and said the police interrogating him had physically attacked him on May 1 in the police chief's room at the Organized Crime branch, that "on the same day the physical and psychological assault occurred four times" and that, "On May 4 before seeing my lawyer I was again subjected to violence in the room of the commissaire or a more senior chief."39 Despite this the court took no steps to order the prosecutor to investigate the allegations.


O.D. subsequently provided his lawyers with a detailed six-page hand-written account dated May 17, 2017, in which he alleges he and others were tortured, describing in detail the treatment he had been subjected to in police custody. O.D.'s lawyers have shared a copy with Human Rights Watch, and have lodged a formal complaint with the prosecutor. In it, O.D. described being detained from his home, taken to the anti-terror department sports hall, and held there with hundreds of others, some of whom were taken away, interrogated, and brought back limping and crying. He claims his
interrogation took place at the Organized Crime branch:

I was taken in the afternoon at around 14:00 [on May 1, 2017] to the room of the head of the Organized Crime branch. There were four people, apart from the head in the room. Some were senior. One police man was called "Osman" and one of the senior ones spoke with a Black Sea accent. The head of the branch called…Seven [sic – writes his surname and no first name] was there.
The head asked me questions and I answered, "I don't know, I have no information." On that they made me kneel down and began to slap and punch my head, and at the same time say "What is it you don't know, you
child whose mother's c… I f…, you son of a bitch." [he abbreviated these
curses] They rained abuses on me and continued to beat me harder.40

O.D.'s account states that he was also threatened with rape and rape of his wife, baby and female relatives, and in his written account claims he was subjected to the same treatment again on May 4. It lists the other kinds of torture which other detainees told him they had been subjected to – including electric shocks, sexual assault, and rape with an object.41

Source:HRW, In Custody Police Torture and Abductions in Turkey