Six months after five Turkish men were convicted of the grisly murders of three Christians in southeast Turkey ten years ago, an appeals court has upheld their three consecutive life sentences in prison.
The regional Gaziantep 3rd Criminal Court of Appeals decision on 18 July confirmed the incarceration of Emre Gunaydin, Salih Gurler, Abuzer Yildirim, Cuma Ozdemir and Hamit Ceker for 39 years and nine months.
Then between 19 and 21 years of age, the five murderers had tortured with knives and then slashed the throats of Turkish Christians Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel and German Protestant Tilmann Geske at the Zirve Christian publishing house in Malatya on 18 April 2007. The slain Christians left behind two widows, five young children and a fiancée.
“This trial should not have taken so long… The Malatya court accepted that there was a link to some organisation, but said it could not discover which one it was. But still this confirmation of the sentence is a good thing.”
Association of Protestant Churches
During the trial, the defendants insisted they were trying to stop the “harmful activities” of Christian missionaries who they claimed were trying to destroy Turkey and the honour of Islam.
However, lengthy prison sentences were quashed against two military personnel who had been found guilty of criminal involvements in the case. Due to legal discrepancies in the Malatya court’s written verdict issued last September, the appeals court cancelled their jail sentences and ordered a re-examination of the Malatya case files.
Retired Col. Mehmet Ulger and Major Haydar Yesil had been jailed for nearly four years during the later years of the trial investigation over their suspected activities, accused of “violating confidential communications” and “fraudulent official documentation”.
‘I have truly forgiven’
In April, on the tenth anniversary of the killings known in Turkey as the “Malatya massacre”, German widow Susanne Geske told the Turkish press she had forgiven the men who killed her husband and the father of their three children.
“Some people think that I am still angry and I haven’t been able to forgive them. I want to say again, ten years have passed, and I have truly forgiven those five youths. Maybe someday if there is an opportunity, I will go to the prison; I want to tell them themselves that I have forgiven them.”
Noting that it was still unclear who had been behind the killings, Geske said that it would please her for this to be proved. “But my heart is at rest, because I have left all this to God,” she told Milliyet newspaper.
“Some people think that I am still angry and I haven’t been able to forgive them. I want to say again, ten years have passed, and I have truly forgiven those five youths. Maybe someday if there is an opportunity, I will go to the prison; I want to tell them themselves that I have forgiven them.”
Susanne Geske
According to Turkey’s Association of Protestant Churches (APC) spokesperson Soner Tufan, “This trial should not have taken so long… Our purpose in this court case was to reveal the perpetrating conspiracy behind these five youths whose heads had been filled with the trigger [to murder]. The Malatya court accepted that there was a link to some organisation, but said it could not discover which one it was. But still this [appeals court] confirmation of the sentence is a good thing.”
“We were waiting for this expected result in Gaziantep,” APC general secretary Umut Sahin told World Watch Monitor. But he said the Turkish judicial procedures are not yet completed, explaining that the case will now go to the Supreme Court, and then to the Constitutional Court. Then it would be eligible to be sent to the European Court of Human Rights.
Tufan added that under the Turkish penal code, the five men, who have already spent about seven-and-a-half years in jail, could possibly be considered for release after a minimum of ten years into their sentences.