Emine Şenyaşar, an activist who has been demanding justice for three family members murdered by people connected to a lawmaker from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), faces a prison sentence for allegedly resisting and insulting a police officer as well as for obstructing a law enforcement operation, the Duvar English news website reported on Wednesday.
Şenyaşar was accused of preventing the officer from doing her job and insulting her during an altercation with the police, who removed her banner that read, “Justice for the Şenyaşar family, justice for everyone.”
The incident took place on October 7, 2022, on the 578th day of Şenyaşar’s “Justice Watch” in front of the Urfa Courthouse.
The first hearing of her trial is scheduled for November 5, 2024.
Şenyaşar has faced 31 investigations since she began a sit-in in March 2021 in front of the courthouse to seek justice for her loved ones, 10 of which later turned into prosecutions.
In June 2018 her husband Esvet Şenyaşar and two of their sons, Adil and Celal, were brutally murdered in Şanlıurfa by the family of AKP deputy İbrahim Halil Yıldız.
They were initially attacked in their store and taken to a hospital. However, they were followed by Yıldız’s family to the hospital, where they were ultimately murdered. Eight more people were injured during fights between the two groups. An older brother of Yıldız was also killed.
According to her son Ferit Şenyaşar, who survived the incident, bullets from 17 different guns were retrieved from the body of one of his brothers.
Two Şenyaşar brothers, Ferit and Fadıl, who were injured but survived, were later detained, and Fadıl Şenyaşar was arrested. However, none of Yıldız’s relatives or his bodyguards were detained despite the fact that three people had died.
Only 15 months later, on September 18, 2020, was Yıldız’s older brother, Enver Yıldız, arrested.
The Yıldız family claimed that they had been the victims of terrorism and that the Kurdish Şenyaşar family had links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The case is seen by many as the epitome of the prevalent climate of impunity in the country, which was ranked 117th among 142 countries in the 2023 Rule of Law Index published by the World Justice Project (WJP) in late October, dropping one place in comparison to the previous year.
