Six teenagers who were detained in the southeastern province of Hakkari on Wednesday allege that they were mistreated by the police, the Mezopotamya news agency reported on Friday.
The police took eight teenagers into custody on Wednesday night. Two of them were released shortly thereafter, while the remaining six were kept in custody until 3:30 a.m.
The teenagers recounting the events of the night said they were detained because they objected to their friend, identified only by the initials R.T., being taken into custody. Police officers began to question the teens when they put them into a police car.
“The officers repeatedly hit me in the head with a two-way radio,” R.T said. He said that when he asked the police why they were beating him, they responded, “Where were you last night? Do you know about the armored vehicle shooting in the Cumhuriyet neighborhood on the evening of July 30? Was it you who did it?”
R.T. explained that he told the police he was at home. He added that while in the vehicle, the police constantly insulted him and used obscene language.
“Because I objected to the insults, I was repeatedly hit on the head with a radio and beaten while having water poured over my head,” he said.
U.Ş., another detained teenager, said he was beaten after denying the accusations against him. “The police beat me for hours. They poured cold water over my head twice. I was taken out of the vehicle after I started bleeding from my nose and mouth. They washed my face to clean off the blood and then started beating me again,” he said.
“They asked me, ‘Where is Kurdistan?’ and I replied, ‘You would know better than me.’ Because of that, they beat me repeatedly.”
U.Ş. also reported overhearing the police telling their superior in the vehicle, “I think we should shoot them in the head and dump them here. No one will ever know we killed them.”
He added that he was taken to a dark, deserted place and told to run. “I thought they were going to kill me. I was afraid they would make it look like I didn’t comply with a ‘stop’ warning, so I didn’t run,” he said. He was left on a bypass five kilometers from town. His T-shirt, stained with blood, was taken off of him, leaving him half naked. After returning home, he went to the hospital and received a medical report documenting the assault.
Torture in custody and prisons is a systematic problem in Turkey about which local rights groups, parliamentarians and state authorities receive hundreds of complaints every year.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution in January on torture and ill-treatment that highlighted the increase in alleged incidents reported from Turkey in past years.
Although victims can include people detained or imprisoned on any grounds, several documents in recent years have indicated that the practice is more pervasive and systematic when it comes to people detained during demonstrations that include criticism of the government or those targeted on other political grounds such as their alleged ties to political and civil networks not approved of by the government.
