Footage from the US found after 7 years!..

We think that the assassination of Assoc. Prof. Necip Hablemitoğlu, the most significant unsolved murder of the AKP era, has been solved and the perpetrators have been found, right?

Yes, it was alleged that this assassination was carried out by some former Special Forces Command personnel linked to a "criminal organization" established by retired Colonel Levent Göktaş, under the planning of Fetullah Gülen and the so-called Turkey imam Mustafa Özcan, and some individuals were arrested; however, even though 2.5 years have passed since the operations and trials began, the assassination has not been clarified.

Has it not been clarified, or is there no desire for it to be clarified? That is another matter entirely!..

Because in reality, very important evidence in the file disappears, and then, especially as a result of the long efforts of the defense attorneys, it is almost forcibly found.

For example; the footage of the late Hablemitoğlu's conference in Eskişehir on December 14, 2002, four days before he was killed, and his shopping at Migros shortly before he was killed on December 18.

The footage from Migros existed; but the Eskişehir footage was missing. If this were found, it would be determined whether the people thought to have followed Hablemitoğlu at Migros were also at the conference in Eskişehir, and their similarities to the defendants would be examined.

For this, the Ankara 28th High Criminal Court, which is hearing the case, wrote to the Ankara Counter-Terrorism Department (TEM) in May 2023 and requested the Eskişehir footage. The police did not respond. A second letter was written. This time, the police said, "Request it from the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office investigation file." What was understood from this response was that this footage was in the Prosecutor's file. But while the indictment and the trial prosecutor gave an opinion to request the footage from TEM again, the Court decided to request it from both TEM and the Prosecutor's Office. TEM's response this time was: "Our records could not be accessed because our archive was flooded on July 15."

At the hearing on March 8, the following occurred:

Before giving his opinion, the prosecutor requested a break in the hearing, stating that he would check some things from the Judicial Deposit. When he returned, he stated that Hablemitoğlu's Eskişehir conference footage was found in the Judicial Deposit and requested that they be brought into the file. It later emerged that the day before that hearing, the prosecutor had taken both this footage and a large amount of evidence from the Judicial Deposit to examine them, and then returned them!..

After this long or prolonged process, both sets of footage were brought together and given to an expert for examination. In their first report, the expert identified three people thought to have followed Hablemitoğlu at Migros from the footage, which they noted was quite blurry, and marked those among the attendees of the Eskişehir conference who "showed physical similarities" to them. In their second report, they stated that there was no similarity between the people in both the Migros and Eskişehir footage and the defendants.

WHO HID IT AND WHY?

We said the Migros footage was "blurry"; let us also explain what happened to the version of these that had actually been clarified exactly 7 years ago.

We first learned that the footage in question had been clarified in 2019 from Ferhat Ünlü of Sabah Newspaper. In an article he wrote during a period when there was still a confidentiality order on the investigation, Ünlü claimed: "The camera footage of the two people who conducted physical surveillance on Hablemitoğlu before the murder was sent to the US because it was blurry. It was cleaned there and put into the file. There is infinite benefit in the prosecutor accessing this footage."

Ersan Barkın, the lawyer for the Hablemitoğlu family, also brought this claim to the agenda at the hearing last July and asked, "Where is this footage? Ferhat Ünlü knows the file, but I do not. If there is clear footage, why was blurry footage given to the expert?"

Following this development, Ali Soykan, the lawyer for one of the defendants, Levent Göktaş, acted like a detective, examining the file and comparing all correspondence with the judicial deposit records.

Lawyer Soykan first found this record from the Police dated July 26, 2017:

"It is understood that the footage belonging to the workplace named Migros was sent to the USA to be examined on the date of the incident... and that photos of the footage were found inside a CD envelope labeled 'Migros footage 120 photo files (improved footage from the USA)', and the said CDs (2 pieces) are presented in the attachment for examination."

He then determined that this footage, which the Police presented in the form of 2 CDs, did not enter the Judicial Deposit records, and consequently, did not enter the case file.

Finally, at the hearing on October 31, Lawyer Soykan drew attention to these findings and requested that the improved footage be brought from the Ankara TEM. The court accepted the request and wrote a writ to the TEM Branch Directorate.

Result: TEM sent this footage to the Court on November 11. Thus, the footage from the US was also found!..

Since there cannot be this many coincidences or instances of incompetence, the question that must be asked is this:

Is the goal to solve this important assassination or to make it unsolvable?.. Who benefits from dragging out the process like this?!

Müyesser YILDIZ

November 18, 2024