A Turkish court on Wednesday acquitted a man accused of sexually abusing his 8-year-old daughter, who was found dead along with her mother in March, Turkish media reported.
The İstanbul Anadolu 2nd High Criminal Court acquitted Ayhan Şengüler, the father of Hifa İkra Şengüler, citing insufficient evidence. Şengüler had denied the accusations during the hearing, and the prosecutor requested his acquittal.
Lawyers representing women’s organizations and opposition parties sought to join the case under Turkish criminal procedure law, but the court denied their requests. They later walked out in protest after the court refused to give the girl’s lawyers time to respond to the prosecutors’ request for acquittal.
The girl’s mother, Fatmanur Çelik, had accused her husband, Şengüler, of sexually abusing her when she was a minor, after which she was forced to marry him. She also accused him of sexually abusing their daughter beginning at the age of 3. Çelik began a vigil outside the Anadolu Courthouse in İstanbul on January 13, demanding justice for the alleged abuse of her daughter, and continued her protest until her death in March. She said she had received threats and warned that if anything happened to her, her death should not be portrayed as a suicide.
Çelik, 30, and her daughter were found dead in the Marmara Sea off İstanbul’s Zeytinburnu district. The circumstances of their deaths remain unclear, and the findings of the investigation have not been made public. The deaths prompted criticism from women’s rights groups over the authorities’ failure to adequately protect the mother and daughter, while the Family and Social Services Ministry denied allegations that it had failed to act.
Müjde Tozbey, president of the Children and Women First Association, which provided legal assistance to the mother and daughter, criticized the prosecutors for seeking Şengüler’s acquittal on the grounds that the alleged abuse was reported 18 months after it occurred and that there were no eyewitnesses.
She said the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse was 20 years and that the girl had eventually disclosed the abuse to doctors, whose medical reports formed the basis of the prosecution. Tozbey also said perpetrators do not have witnesses present when sexually abusing children
Lawyers representing Hifa İkra asked the court to lift restrictions on public access to the proceedings, saying the judges had failed to protect the girl’s privacy during earlier hearings when she was required to testify in front of men in the courtroom. They criticized the court for closing the proceedings to the public only after the mother and daughter had died. The court rejected the request.
Journalists were barred from the courtroom under the confidentiality order. Representatives of bar associations and women’s organizations were initially denied entry but eventually gained access after protesting.
Before the hearing, women’s rights groups, including the Free Women’s Movement (TJA), the We Will Stop Femicides Platform and the women’s assemblies of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), gathered outside the courthouse, demanding accountability for the alleged abuse and the deaths.
Lawmakers Özgül Saki of the DEM Party and Sevda Karaca of the Labor Party (EMEP), along with Aylin Nazlıaka of the New Party, attended the hearing. Representatives of the Union of Turkish Bar Associations, the İstanbul Bar Association and the Bursa Bar Association’s Women’s Rights Commission were also present.
Karaca criticized the acquittal, while Saki condemned the court’s rejection of the lawyers’ requests. Nazlıaka criticized the decision to question Hifa İkra in a courtroom before her death rather than a specialized interview room designed to protect children.
According to official judicial statistics cited by the Istanbul-based Bread and Rose Association, Turkish courts handled nearly 16,000 sexual abuse cases in 2024, involving 16,790 defendants, of whom 7,310 were convicted.
