A newly released forensic report has raised fresh doubts about the 2015 killings of two police officers in the southeastern town of Ceylanpınar, an incident cited by the Turkish government as the trigger for ending peace talks with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) at the time and resuming large-scale military operations, Turkish Minute reported, citing the Mezopotamya news agency.
In a development that shocked the country, police officers Feyyaz Yumuşak of Şanlıurfa’s counterterrorism branch and Okan Acar of the riot police were found shot dead in their beds on July 22, 2015, in the Ceylanpınar district of southeastern Şanlıurfa province. The two officers had been sharing the same apartment.
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which had been conducting peace talks with the PKK since 2013 in a bid to end the decades-long conflict between Turkey and the PKK, immediately blamed the militant group for the attack.
The Ceylanpınar incident marked the symbolic end of the peace talks between the AKP government and the PKK, leading to the resurgence of violent clashes in Turkey’s southeast.
The new forensic report, added to the case file at Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals nearly a decade after the attack, identifies a fingerprint lifted from the crime scene as belonging to a police officer who had previously denied ever entering the apartment where the officers were killed.
The Şanlıurfa Governor’s Office said in a statement at the time that there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment the officers shared.
According to documents reported by Mezopotamya, a print labeled “L38” matches the left little finger of officer Burak Kuru, a colleague of the slain officers. The same report concludes that five of the 10 fingerprints taken from the home belonged to Kuru.
Kuru had claimed in his earlier testimony that he never entered the apartment. Requests from defense lawyers to question him during the original trial were denied.
The forensic report was among two new documents submitted to the Supreme Court of Appeals on December 2 by the Police Forensic Investigation Department. The documents include comparison tables confirming the fingerprint match.
Key moment in collapse of peace process
Within days of the killings, Turkey launched major airstrikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq. Hostilities escalated across predominantly Kurdish cities in the southeast, curfews were imposed and urban warfare ensued.
Two days before the killing of the two police officers, a bombing in the southern Turkish town of Suruç had left 34 people, mostly Kurdish activists and students, dead. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) extremist group was blamed for the attack.
The PKK described the killing of the officers as retaliation for the Suruç bombing, accusing the policemen of collaborating with ISIL.
Meanwhile, the collapse of the peace process coincided with the AKP’s loss of its parliamentary majority in a general election held in June 2015. It was the party’s worst election defeat since it came to power in 2002.
Then-prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said Turkey needed a single-party government to fight “terrorism,” as the country prepared for snap polls and the army battled the Kurdish militants.
The renewed conflict led to a snap election that November in which the AKP regained control of parliament.
The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the main pro-Kurdish opposition party at the time, accused President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government of exploiting the chaotic situation to maintain his grip on power.
Despite the political significance of the killings, the criminal case never produced a clear perpetrator. Seven suspects who were accused of links to the PKK, arrested after the attack were released in 2018 and later acquitted for lack of evidence.
Officer’s presence contradicts previous testimony
Mezopotamya also reported unusual career movements for officials involved in the original investigation. The first prosecutor on the case was promoted while drafting the indictment and reassigned to the ministry of justice’s IT department before later being elevated to a first-class judge. The judge who initially ordered the arrests, the prosecutor who observed the autopsies and 22 police officers serving in Ceylanpınar at the time were later detained and dismissed from public service on allegations of links to the faith-based Gülen movement.
Case remains unresolved a decade later
The new fingerprint findings add to long-standing questions over how the investigation was handled and why several key lines of investigation were not pursued. Nearly 10 years later, the murders of Yumuşak and Acar remain unsolved, with no perpetrator identified.
The Supreme Court of Appeals is expected to review the newly added forensic material as part of the case, which has been pending before the high court for almost six years. It is not yet clear whether the latest development will prompt a broader reopening of the investigation.
The new discovery comes at a time of a renewed peace process with the PKK, as a part of which the group announced in May that it would lay down its weapons and dissolve itself.
It is not yet known whether this new process, launched in October 2024 by surprise call from far-right leader Devlet Bahçeli, and endorsed by his political ally President Erdoğan, will succeed this time.
The AKP government has not yet taken any steps concerning the future and the reintegration of the PKK militants who laid down their weapons in addition to the demands by Kurds for the release of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who was directly involved in the talks and made the historic call to the PKK to end its armed violence.
The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its Western allies. Some 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict with the PKK over the years.
