Emine Şenyaşar, a woman who has been demanding justice for three of her family members murdered by people connected to a lawmaker from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), now faces up to two years in prison for allegedly insulting the MP, the Artı Gerçek news website reported on Wednesday.
The prosecutor requested Şenyaşar’s imprisonment during a hearing at a Şanlıurfa court before which she appeared in a wheelchair.
The trial was adjourned until December 20 after the defense lawyers asked for extra time.
“The woman sitting on the defendant bench in her wheelchair is Emine Şenyaşar. She has kept watch for 846 days in front of the Şanlıurfa courthouse to seek justice for her husband and children who were murdered in a hospital,” her son Ferit Şenyaşar wrote on social media. “The murderers are free while the mother is put on trial.”
Şenyaşar has faced 31 investigations since she launched her “Justice Watch,” a series of sit-ins in front of a local courthouse in March 2021 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 the family of AKP deputy Yıldız 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 the Kurdish Şenyaşar family had links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and that they had been victims of terrorism.
