Muhammed Macit, a former cadet serving a life sentence in Ankara, recently told a visitor he was considering suicide, the Tr724 news website reported.
During a visit by Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) lawmaker Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu last week, Macit said his life had become meaningless and that he’d rather be “executed” than serve a life sentence. The 31-year-old man’s mental state is so fragile that he wants to be in solitary confinement where he would not have to interact with anybody, according to Gergerlioğlu.
Macit was arrested following a coup attempt on July 15, 2016. The Ankara 19th High Criminal Court sentenced Macit to life imprisonment on charges of “attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, attempting to abolish or prevent the functioning of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, and attempting to overthrow or partially or completely hinder the duties of the Government of the Republic of Turkey by force and violence.”
Macit, like many other cadets, defended himself in court by denying involvement in the coup attempt and said he was only acting on orders from his superiors, who told the cadets that there was a terrorist attack on the night of the attempted coup.
At the time of his arrest Macit was just 21 years old and married for only a week. His wife died in a traffic accident in July 2020, while Macit was imprisoned. He was not allowed to attend the funeral.
Gergerlioğlu expressed great concern about Macit’s mental state and said he is facing severe mental health issues, including depression and suicidal tendencies.
Gergerlioğlu criticized the authorities who sentenced Macit to life without a fair trial as well as those who denied him the ability to attend his wife’s funeral. He argued that these actions contributed to the suffering Macit is enduring.
The coup attempt claimed the lives of 251 people and was put down overnight.
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.
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.
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, according to figures revealed at the end of the video. As of July 2022, 209 cadets were still behind bars.
