Hablemitoğlu Assassination Trial: “Fetullah Gülen Would Have Been Released Too”
In today's final session at the Ankara 28th High Criminal Court, the statements of witnesses, responses to incoming documents, and requests from the defendants and their lawyers were heard.
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In the trial regarding the assassination of academic and author Necip Hablemitoğlu, Ersan Barkın, the lawyer for the Hablemitoğlu family, stated, “These are my final requests,” and demanded that Constitutional Court Member İrfan Fidan, Deputy Director General of Security Mustafa Çalışkan, and the former FETÖ police imam Kemalettin Özdemir be heard as witnesses. He also requested that the HTS records of the late Hablemitoğlu from two days prior to his murder be retrieved to determine whom he had been in contact with. Meanwhile, Prosecutor Zafer Ergün announced that the footage of Hablemitoğlu's conference in Eskişehir is currently held in the Judicial Repository.
In the hearing where detained defendant Nuri Gökhan Bozkır, and non-detained defendants Levent Göktaş, Tarkan Mumcuğlu, Fikret Emek, Mehmet Narin, and Aydın Köstem were present in the courtroom, and Enver Altaylı, who is convicted in another case, connected via SEGBİS from prison, Hablemitoğlu family lawyer Ersan Barkın took the floor first. He emphasized that as early as 1998, Hablemitoğlu had written about where the Gülen movement would evolve and who his heirs would be in the event of his death, and that Turkey learned these facts by experiencing them on July 15.
Highlighting that the Hablemitoğlu assassination was used in various different channels, such as Ergenekon, and took on a completely different form after July 15, Attorney Barkın continued:
“We are here to bear witness to history; for us, the primary focus is not the verdict to be rendered. This case will conclude when Necip Hablemitoğlu’s political and academic identity is upheld. We have experienced everything: the retraction of certain statements, allegations of torture, the fact that no one from the court’s original panel remains, the departure of the prosecutor and the arrival of the indictment prosecutor at the bench, and the release of all defendants; if he were not a fugitive but here, I suppose Fetullah Gülen would have been released too.”