Şüheda Sena Öğütalan, one of three female former air force cadets serving life sentences handed down in a trial concerning a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, appealed for justice on Tuesday in a letter published in the Karar daily.
In her letter to columnist Elif Çakır, Öğütalan said that as a cadet, she had no command authority and committed no crimes during events at the Orhanlı toll plaza in İstanbul’s Tuzla district in the July 15 attempted coup. She said they were detained by the very police they had called and that despite a lack of evidence, a local court had imposed life sentences.
Her case is now pending before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) after the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld her sentence in July 2022.
On the night of the abortive putsch, Air Force Academy students were bussed from a training camp in Yalova toward İstanbul on orders from their commanders, who told them there was a terrorist attack. The group Öğütalan was a part of had to stop at the Orhanlı toll plaza after the police blocked the highway. Clashes broke out in the area later in the night, leaving six dead and dozens injured.
During the trial defense attorneys said that although police had seized all firearms at the scene, no ballistic analysis was conducted to trace which weapons caused the injuries and deaths. They added that requests to examine submitted camera footage were also rejected by the court.
The cadets have denied taking part in the coup attempt, saying they were only acting on orders from their superiors.
Öğütalan highlighted inconsistencies in the supreme court’s rulings in similar coup-related cases that involved cadets. She noted that in what is known as the Sultanbeyli and Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge cases, the court explicitly acknowledged the defendants’ status as “military students” in its acquittals or reversals, while upholding a life sentence in her case despite the same status.
“We are living through something neither reason can grasp nor law can explain,” Öğütalan wrote. “I expect mercy from no one. My only wish is justice.”
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.
A documentary telling the stories of military cadets in Turkey, hundreds of whom were unjustly convicted due to their alleged involvement in the failed coup in 2016, premiered on YouTube several days before the sixth anniversary of the coup attempt in 2022, drawing more than 1 million viewers.
Immediately after the abortive putsch, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pinned the blame on the faith-based Gülen movement. The movement, inspired by the views of the late Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, denies the accusations.
