The mother of Ümit Horzum, a dismissed public servant who was reportedly abducted from his car in Ankara earlier this month, has asked for help from officials, in a video recording. “My son has been missing since Dec 6. Where did they take my son? What did my son do? Did he kill somebody? I call on officials with common sense. …Please hear us out. Don’t you have children? Don’t you have parents?” the elderly woman said.
“Does he deserve to be abducted by armed people? Is he dead or alive? I call on officials with common sense. I am a cancer patient under treatment,” she added.
A former public servant who was removed from his job at the Turkish Accreditation Agency (TURKAK) in a government’s post-coup emergency decree, Horzum was abducted from his white, 2004 Skoda with a license plate 20 H 1931 in Ankara, according to his wife.
“I haven’t heard from my husband Ümit Horzum since Wednesday, Dec 6, 2017, 6 pm. …Following media reports on tortured detainees, my husband was scared and he left home to hide. …A short while after leaving, gendarmerie came to our home to detain him. …He was not staying at home since then. A few days ago, one of his friends stopped by to say that his car was stopped and that he was abducted by force. [His friend] left without answering any further question,” the Horzum Family, a Twitter account believed to be controlled by Umit’s wife said in a series of tweets on Dec. 15, 2017
Mysterious disappearances involving already-victimized opposition groups have become a common occurrence in Turkey in the aftermath of a July 15 coup attempt.
At least eleven people were alleged have been abducted so far. Previously, three teachers, a lawyer, a university employee, two intelligence agency officials, an Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTİK) employee and a Competition Authority employee have been reported while one of the teachers was handed over by unidentified men to police after spending 42 days out of sight. Also, an Ankara man named Sunay Elmas is reported to have been abducted, but this particular case took place on Jan. 27, 2016.
Those not seen for quite some time mostly have in common in their personal histories that they have lost their jobs amid a sweeping crackdown that the Turkish government has conducted against its critics, particularly members of the Gülen movement.
Turkish government accuses the movement of masterminding the July 15, 2016 coup attempt while the latter denies. More than 150,000 people have lost their jobs, some 130,000 have been detained and 60,000 of them were remanded in prison pending trial over Gulen ties so far.
Earlier this week, journalist Cem Küçük, a staunch supporter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, suggested during a live TV program on Monday that Turkish intelligence should kill family members of jailed Gülenists in order to turn the inmates into operatives for the Erdoğan regime.
Speaking during a live TV show along with his program partner journalist Fuat Uğur, Küçük said Israeli intelligence agency MOSSAD had killed family members of Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian inmates to make them MOSSAD operatives (turkeypurge.com)
