The father of a former military cadet serving a life sentence for allegedly participating in a 2016 coup attempt called for justice at a lawyers’ vigil in İstanbul on Thursday, TR724 news website reported.
Speaking with İstanbul Bar Association President İbrahim Özden Kaboğlu at the “Vigil of Justice” outside the Çağlayan Courthouse in İstanbul, Veysel Kılıç said his son was jailed at the age of 17 after an unfair trial and that for nine years authorities have not addressed the family’s appeals.
Selahattin Kılıç was convicted of attempting to destroy the constitutional order and attempting to overthrow the Turkish government and parliament by force. He was sentenced to two life terms and 198 years in prison. He was a student at the Turkish Air Force Academy at the time.
The İstanbul Bar Association organized Thursday’s vigil to demand the release of lawyers arrested while carrying out their professional duties.
Kılıç himself had maintained a vigil at the same spot beginning in August 2016 to protest his son’s arrest. He later participated in the March of Justice from Ankara to İstanbul, launched by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) on June 15, 2017.
A total of 259 military cadets were detained on coup charges on July 16, 2016 and arrested four days later. They were indicted a year into pretrial detention, with the case concluding in May 2018.
One hundred seventy-eight of the cadets were given life sentences on charges of attempting to overturn the constitutional order and attempting to overthrow the Turkish government and parliament by use of force.
The cadets have long said they didn’t know a coup attempt was underway and were bussed from a training camp to İstanbul on orders from their commanders, who told them there was a terrorist attack. Following the coup attempt, 16,409 military cadets were expelled from their academies by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny, and 355 of them were given life sentences, with some of them overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeals.
