A man sentenced in Turkey to 1 year and 3 months in prison for the brutal murder of a cat in an apartments block, will face a retrial following social outrage at the sentence handed down by a local court in Istanbul, which many Turks consider insufficient and which has been criticised even by the Government itself.
The sad incident took place on New Year’s Eve in a building in the Başakşehir district, on the outskirts of Istanbul’s European side, where the neighbours had adopted “Eros”, a stray cat that they fed and sheltered. It was the building’s cameras that recorded how İbrahim Keloğlan, after finding the cat in the lift, kicked the animal several times until he died, in a torture that lasted 6 minutes.
It was neighbours themselves, after finding the cat’s body next to a pool of blood, who in shock called the police and filed a complaint against the aggressor, who was arrested and put on trial, where a local court of first instance sentenced Keloğlan to a reduced sentence of 1 year 3 months in prison, arguing that the man had no previous criminal records and had shown his remorse during the trial. The lawyer of the neighbours, Merve Poyraz Özcan, had demanded that he should be punished “with the maximum penalty allowed by law”.
The news of the verdict and the reduced sentence for the perpetrator of the animal’s death quickly sparked a wave of outrage in Turkey, with hundreds of thousands of people strongly criticising the sentence on social media and demanding a retrial.
Following the protests, a Criminal Court quickly intervened and, after the local prosecutor filed an appeal, a new case was opened against Keloğlan, who will now face a retrial for the brutal murder of the cat, as confirmed by Turkey’s Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç himself, who stressed that “the right to life of every living being is sacred“. With the new animal abuse law passed in 2021 in Turkey, the man could now face up to a 4-year sentence, which would force him to enter prison.
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As a history lover, Pablo Gómez was captivated by Turkey from the first day he visited it in 2006: he got married there, has a house there… and has since become an expert on Turkey’s current affairs. With a long experience in media, he has been at the helm of hispanatolia.com since 2011.
