The Turkish judiciary has announced a sentence to life imprisonment for Mustafa Ören, the paper collector who confessed early last November the killing of Şirin Elmas Hanilçi, a six-year-old girl, after sexually abusing her in the Feriköy cemetery in Istanbul’s central Şişli district.
Turkish media reported that the verdict was announced after the first hearing of the trial held at the 37th Supreme Criminal Court of Çağlayan in Istanbul, which finally convicted Ören after he waived his defence during the trial. The case dates back to last 31 October, when Şirin’s body was found in the Feriköy cemetery after her parents had reported her missing two days earlier, even appearing on a television programme to ask for help.
During the investigation launched by the Turkish police and after examining several security cameras in the area, it was found that the last person who had been in contact with the girl was a middle-aged man who used to collect paper and cardboard in the streets. After being questioned at the police station, the man finally confessed to strangling the girl with a scarf she was wearing. ‘She came and kept asking me for money, she made me angry, so I killed her,’ the man confessed.
The police report states that the killer took the girl to a secluded area not far from the entrance to the cemetery, and that once there he put her between two graves and sexually abused her, putting a scarf over her mouth to prevent her from screaming; the man then killed her to hide the evidence of his crime, using the scarf to strangle the child.
Confessed killer waived his defence at trial
During yesterday’s hearing in Istanbul, at which the accused was not present but appeared remotely from prison via the SEGBIS audio-visual system, Ören waived his defence by simply answering ‘I have nothing to say’ and accepting the statements previously made to the police and the prosecutor. His legal representative confirmed that his client accepted his guilt and that ‘we have nothing to add’, limiting himself to requesting a psychiatric report on his mental health, according to the proceedings.
Those who were present in the courtroom were Şirin’s father and mother, İbrahim and Yeter, who could not hold back tears during the trial. ‘When my wife told me that my daughter was missing, we started looking for her. Then we went to the police station. They told us that my daughter had been found and that this murderer had killed my daughter,’ İbrahim said. ‘When I came home, my daughter was gone. What right did he have to murder my daughter? Since that day, I have not stopped crying,’ said the mother in tears.
The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment without parole and up to 39 years in prison for other crimes. In the end, the Istanbul court sentenced the girl’s killer to life imprisonment without parole for the crime of ‘premeditated murder’, as well as another 51 years: 30 years for the crime of ‘sexual assault’, and a further 21 years for ‘deprivation of liberty’. The horrific crime has shocked Turkey just days after the trial for the murder of another girl, Narin Güran, who was also strangled to death.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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