Footage that could solve the Hablemitoğlu assassination has been lost to a flood!..

The perpetrators who murdered Author and Academic Assoc. Prof. Dr. Necip Hablemitoğlu in front of his home on December 18, 2002, were finally found 20 years later.

So much so that President Erdoğan himself announced that Gökhan Nuri Bozkır, a former member of the Special Forces Command identified as a suspect in the assassination, had been captured in Ukraine. While making this announcement, he emphasized that bringing Bozkır back was proof of their determination to shed light on past unsolved murders.

According to the prepared indictment, the Hablemitoğlu assassination was carried out by “a group of officers from the Special Forces Command affiliated with the organization of retired Colonel Levent Göktaş, at the instigation of FETÖ.”

However, during the trial process that began in February 2023, developments occurred that did not confirm the findings in the indictment.

For example, when Tarkan Mumcuoğlu, who was alleged to be the “trigger man,” proved with witnesses and documents that he was in Kazakhstan on the date of the murder, all defendants, including Levent Göktaş and Gökhan Nuri Bozkır, were released.

THE SOUGHT-AFTER FOOTAGE

With the release decision, the Court focused on two pieces of footage from before Hablemitoğlu was killed.

One of these was the footage of the conference organized by the Atatürkist Thought Association in Eskişehir, which the late Hablemitoğlu attended on December 14, 2002. The other was the security camera recordings from the Migros market that Hablemitoğlu visited on the day he was killed.

The Court decided that the footage from Eskişehir should be requested urgently from the Ankara Police Department's Counter-Terrorism Branch.

Once these arrived, the following was to be done:

Those images would be compared with the Migros recordings, and a report would be prepared regarding whether two individuals aged 25-35, one slightly shorter than the other, who were suspected of following Hablemitoğlu at the Migros and were seen walking together with a shopping basket, were among those attending the conference in Eskişehir. If it were understood that the individuals in question were also seen at the conference, photographs and certain information regarding majors and lower-ranking officers/non-commissioned officers serving in the Special Forces Command MAK Regiment as of December 18, 2002, would be requested from the Ministry of National Defense.

In summary; the possibility arose that the assassins might not be the defendants in the case, and the Court had decided to “file a criminal complaint with the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office regarding the determination of who the primary perpetrator who pulled the trigger in the incident was, as it is understood at the current stage that the perpetrator who pulled the trigger may not be the defendant Tarkan Mumcuoğlu, and if this perpetrator is identified, to determine whether it is with the defendants in our file or if there are other individuals involved in the incident.”

Following these decisions, the observations of Ersan Barkın, the lawyer for the Hablemitoğlu family, who filed a motion for the recusal of the panel of judges, were quite striking:

“Has this not been requested by the Prosecutor's Office and the investigation until today? Let's say it wasn't requested and examined... What kind of interim decision is this? We should have written their names. We should have said, 'We think this murder was committed by Ahmet and Mehmet from the Special Forces Command. Bring them in; evaluate them with those at the conference.' Why wasn't it written to the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, why not to the Naval Forces Command, why not, for example, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but you are pinpointing and requesting a list of people with the rank of major and below from the Special Forces Command? Does our state know the names of the killers of this murder? Where are these killers? Are they alive? Are these killers convicted in other files? Are they fugitives abroad? Are they related to the current defendants or not? This question is valuable. If our state has truly made such a determination with any of the current defendant panel and reached the killers of the murder, our hearts will be at ease. If there is no elbow contact with any of the current defendants, the only thing the Public Prosecutor's Office will do regarding these people is a decision of non-prosecution. The conclusion of this file due to the statute of limitations.”

DOES THE PROSECUTOR HAVE IT OR NOT?

Another detail that is noteworthy in terms of what we will tell from here on was this:

At the hearing where the release decisions were made, Zafer Ergün, who prepared the indictment for this case and appeared at the podium as the trial prosecutor, had also requested that it be investigated whether the Eskişehir conference footage was at the Ankara Counter-Terrorism Branch, and if so, that it be brought to be compared with other video recordings in the case file.

Let's come to what happened after the Court's decision.

On May 22, a letter was sent to the Ankara Counter-Terrorism Branch requesting the Eskişehir footage. The police did not respond to this letter.

A second letter was written on August 1. In the response given two days later, the police suggested that “the footage of the conference in question be requested from the investigation file numbered 2004/121619 of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office.”

The meaning of this answer was that the Eskişehir footage was in the investigation file prepared after the murder. If so, had Prosecutor Zafer Ergün, who conducted the final investigation and prepared this indictment, never looked at the first file, even though he himself requested that the footage be brought?

Furthermore, if the footage was in the file in question, since when had it been there? Did it enter the file in the period immediately after the murder, or did the Police send them to the Prosecutor's Office instead of the Court upon the letter the Court wrote on May 22? In that case, wasn't the Prosecutor's Office hiding information/documents from the Court?

THE FOOTAGE AT THE SCRAPYARD

Let's continue.

The footage did not arrive during the hearings held last December. Moreover, what was said by a scrap dealer named H.Ş., who was heard as a witness because it was determined that he sold various materials to defendant Gökhan Nuri Bozkır, made the matter even more inextricable.

After H.Ş. explained that he saved those images to his phone after the police gave him photos of two people during the investigation process and asked him to research them, and then showed them to the Court panel and the lawyers, defense lawyer Eren Turan made the following assessment:

“The place where these two people are located also looks like a conference hall. These people could be the individuals for whom a criminal complaint was filed with the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office to be investigated, as they were thought to have followed the late Hablemitoğlu at his conference in Eskişehir. The fact that those photos are with H.Ş. is a separate issue; but the police and the prosecutor know that these photos are being given. The Eskişehir Police say, 'Request it from there.' This means it is at the Ankara Police. Let it be asked whether it exists or not and why these people are being investigated.”

At the same hearing, the lawyer for the Hablemitoğlu family also said, “As understood from the response from the Police, the footage is in the investigation file. Let it be written to the Police again, and also to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, so that this footage can be brought into the file,” while Prosecutor Zafer Ergün gave an opinion that the Eskişehir conference footage should only be asked for and requested from the Counter-Terrorism Branch.

In the end, the Court decided that this footage should be requested from both the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office and the Counter-Terrorism Branch.

NOT AT COUNTER-TERRORISM BECAUSE

Let's come to the final situation regarding the fate of the late Hablemitoğlu's Eskişehir footage.

Following the Court's last decision, a new letter was written to the Ankara Counter-Terrorism Branch. In response from the Counter-Terrorism Branch, a report prepared by two police officers was sent. The report stated the following:

“Regarding the subject, it was reported to the Counter-Terrorism Department and all police departments with our circular letter dated July 24, 2016, and numbered ........... that our Counter-Terrorism Branch Directorate archive was flooded after the failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016, and that our archive records could not be accessed, and as a result of the examination made among the documents that could be saved, the requested camera recordings were not found.”

The Hablemitoğlu assassination trial will continue today, and witnesses will be heard for a week. But it seems that the issue of the footage will once again mark the hearing.

Since the Police could not find this evidence, which is extremely important for shedding light on the murder, the last hope is the Prosecutor's Office... Let's see if it will come out of the files there?!