A man freed from prison under Turkey’s latest controversial mass release program for criminal offenders strangled his partner to death three days later, the TR724 news website reported.
The murder took place in the Sur district of Diyarbakır, a predominantly Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey. The suspect, 37-year-old Okay Gür, had been released three days earlier from prison, where he had been serving a sentence for drug trafficking.
Gür was released under the 11th Judicial Reform Package, approved by the Turkish Parliament on December 24. The legislation led to the early release of roughly 50,000 inmates by expanding an early release mechanism first introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the law convicts who committed eligible offenses on or before July 31, 2023, can be transferred earlier from closed prisons to open facilities and then to supervised release or probation. Government officials say the reform aims to ease chronic prison overcrowding and streamline parole procedures.
Rights groups and legal advocates say while the government is freeing criminals, thousands of inmates jailed on political grounds remain behind bars.
Pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) MP Zülküf Uçar pointed to the discriminatory nature of the package on X, noting that inmates convicted on political grounds are once again left out.
“These reform packages have opened the door only for ordinary criminal offenders, while political prisoners continue to be excluded,” said Gülistan Kılıç Koçyiğit, the deputy chairperson of the DEM Party. “This creates a clear inequality in how the law is applied.”
Since a failed coup in 2016, Turkey has used terrorism laws to pursue an enormous post-coup crackdown on political dissidents. Human rights organizations have long criticized Turkey’s broadly defined terrorism laws, arguing they allow authorities to imprison critics of the government for speech, reporting or association rather than acts of violence.
Many of those targeted are alleged followers of the faith-based Gülen movement, inspired by inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, as well as journalists, Kurdish activists and other government opponents.
Justice ministry data show that a total of 3,093,084 people have been investigated for terrorism-related offenses since the coup attempt, with 527,100 convicted.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
According to the latest figures from the justice ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active investigation nearly a decade later.
