Turkey’s Constitutional Court ordered a retrial for a Kurdish man who was arrested at age 14 and later sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment over killings during the 2014 Kobani protests, the Mezopotamya news agency reported Friday.
In its unanimous ruling dated September 16, the court found that Mazlum İçli’s right to a reasoned judgment, part of the right to a fair trial, had been violated because the trial court failed to adequately assess conflicting expert reports that could have affected the outcome of the case. It sent the case back to the Ankara 2nd High Criminal Court to remedy the violation.
The Constitutional Court found that the trial court had relied on a report by an expert identified only by the initials H.T., tentatively identifying İçli in footage from the scene of the killings. However, it failed to explain why it disregarded a second report by the same expert that strongly suggested İçli appeared in video footage and photographs from a wedding 140 kilometers away he said he attended that day.
The court said the trial judges should have sought a more detailed examination by the Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK) or another specialist institution to resolve the conflicting findings. The ATK’s Digital Forensics Department has an Audio and Video Examination Unit that conducts such analyses.
The protests took place across predominantly Kurdish southeastern Turkey October 6-8, 2014, as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) laid siege to the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani. The unrest left 37 people dead. İçli and 21 co-defendants were later convicted in connection with the killings of four people as well as of undermining the country’s territorial integrity and disseminating terrorist propaganda. İçli was sentenced to more than 124 years in prison.
İçli’s lawyers presented witness testimony, cellphone location records and video footage supporting his account that he was performing as a musician at a wedding in Diyarbakır’s Keçiveren village, approximately 140 kilometers from the scene of the killings.
In 2020, Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld İçli’s conviction for involvement in the killings of three people but overturned his conviction in the killing of Yasin Börü and ordered a retrial. In the retrial the Ankara 2nd High Criminal Court convicted him again in September 2021, sentencing him to aggravated life. Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals upheld that sentence in May 2023.
İçli’s lawyer, Mahsuni Karaman, filed three individual applications with the Constitutional Court in July 2020, August 2021 and August 2023, alleging violations of İçli’s right to a fair trial. The court consolidated the applications into a single case but postponed its ruling twice, in May 2025 and April 2026.
