A district governor in southeastern Turkey has blocked the prosecution of a police officer who fatally struck 7-year-old Miraç Miroğlu with an armored vehicle, arguing that the officer “had no alternative but to hit the child,” Turkish Minute reported.
Miroğlu was killed on September 3, 2021, in the Turgut Özal neighborhood of İdil, a district in Şırnak province, when the armored police vehicle hit him as he was riding his bicycle. The impact left the child critically injured, and he died shortly after being taken to a nearby hospital.
Following the incident, prosecutors charged the driver — identified as a police officer with the İdil District Police Department — with causing death by negligence. The İdil Criminal Court of First Instance acquitted the officer in January 2024, citing a forensic report that declared him faultless and blamed the child for entering the road. However, the ruling was later overturned by the Diyarbakır Regional Court of Appeals due to a procedural error: Authorities had not received prior administrative permission to try the officer, a requirement under Turkish law for public officials.
The Ministry of Interior and the İdil District Governor’s Office delayed their response to the prosecution request for nearly two years. They eventually denied permission to proceed, effectively ending any chance of a retrial.
According to the Mezopotamya news agency, the decision was based on an internal review prepared not by an independent body but by a police supervisor from the same department where the officer was employed. The governor, Anıl Adıgüzel, accepted this report’s conclusion that the officer bore no fault and rejected the request to reopen the case.
The administrative decision cited reports by the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Istanbul, which claimed that the vehicle was traveling at 30.1 kilometers per hour and obeying speed regulations. It further argued that sunlight impaired the officer’s visibility, that the structure of armored vehicles limits peripheral vision and that no damage was visible on the front of the vehicle.
The report concluded that Miraç Miroğlu was “at fault” for entering the road and that the officer had “no option but to hit the child.”
Lawyers representing the Miroğlu family condemned the ruling and said they will appeal the administrative decision. “We will exhaust all legal avenues to ensure accountability,” one of the attorneys told Mezopotamya.
The case has become emblematic of what rights groups call a broader pattern of impunity for deaths caused by armored police and military vehicles in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast.
A 2022 report by the Diyarbakır Bar Association found that 22 children had been killed in similar vehicle incidents since 2011 — nearly all in Kurdish-majority cities — and that criminal courts consistently acquitted the officers involved or handed down only symbolic fines.
