A Turkish court has acquitted a noncommissioned gendarmerie officer in the case of an 18-month-old toddler who was killed when a tear gas canister struck him in the head on the balcony of his home in southeastern Turkey in 2009, the Mezopotamya news agency reported.
The Cizre 4th Criminal Court of First Instance ruled at the eighth hearing of the trial that there was insufficient evidence to convict Specialist Sgt. Hakan Alkan on charges of “involuntary manslaughter,” despite the prosecutor seeking a conviction.
Mehmet Uytun was sitting on his mother’s lap on the balcony of their home in Cizre, in Şırnak province, on October 9, 2009, when he was struck in the head by a tear gas canister allegedly fired by Alkan during security operations in the area.
Lawyers for Mehmet’s family argued that the case should be heard by a high criminal court rather than a criminal court of first instance, saying the allegations amounted to voluntary manslaughter, not involuntary manslaughter.
The court rejected the lawyers’ requests and acquitted Alkan. Yakup Güven, a lawyer for the Uytun family, said they would appeal the ruling.
The latest proceedings, the third trial in the case, had been ongoing since January 2023 after two previous convictions were overturned on appeal.
In the first trial the Cizre Criminal Court of First Instance sentenced Alkan in June 2021 to three years in prison for causing death by negligence but later converted the sentence into a fine of 18,200 Turkish lira ($2,108). An appeals court subsequently overturned the ruling.
In the second trial, Alkan was sentenced to three years, four months in prison. His lawyers appealed, and the Diyarbakır Regional Court of Appeals overturned the verdict, citing an incomplete investigation.
The case has reinforced longstanding concerns over impunity in Turkey, where rights advocates say prosecutions of security force members over killings in the predominantly Kurdish southeast often end in acquittals, reduced charges, lenient sentences or yearslong proceedings that delay accountability.
