After 100 days behind bars over accusations of belonging to a Turkish “terrorist organization,” Mustafa Yilmaz was relieved to be back with his wife and daughter, and to be allowed to return to work — but his problems were far from over.
On Feb. 19, six weeks after his release, he disappeared.
His wife, Sumeyye Yilmaz, says CCTV footage shows him being confronted outside their home after leaving for work and taken by two men before a black van passes by.
Photo: AFP
She fears he is now being held by “deep state” operatives and possibly tortured.
Mustafa Yilmaz is one of 28 men that rights activists and lawmakers say have been disappeared by security forces since a failed coup in July 2016.
Twenty-five of them have since reappeared — either they turned up in the custody of the authorities or near a mountain somewhere in Turkey — but Mustafa Yilmaz and two others are still missing.
The activists and lawmakers say that many of the 28 have been tortured — the government says it has a zero-tolerance policy toward torture.
“Why is my partner not being released? What do they want to do? Is he still alive?” Sumeyye Yilmaz, 27, said in an interview as their two-year-old daughter played nearby.
“In the first few days he was taken, my daughter would ask: ‘Where is he?’ Now she has stopped. She’s a child, she’s forgetting,” she said, through tears.
Mustafa Yilmaz, 33, was one of six men who disappeared in February within a few days of each other in Ankara, the southern city of Antalya and the northwestern province of Edirne.
All of them had been accused of ties to an Islamic organization run by US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara claims ordered the 2016 attempted coup.
On July 28, the families were told that four of the missing were being held by Ankara police.
Mustafa Yilmaz and another man, Gokhan Turkmen, were not among them, which hit Sumeyye Yilmaz particularly hard.
“The period after July 28 was like hell for me,” she said.
Both Mustafa and Sumeyye Yilmaz were accused of ties to the Gulen group — a charge that has seen tens of thousands of people arrested or stripped of their jobs since the coup bid.
The couple denies the claims.
However, Mustafa Yilmaz, a physiotherapist, was arrested in October last year and sentenced to six years in prison. He was out pending an appeal when he disappeared.
The nightmare began for Sumeyye Yilmaz when she received a telephone call from her husband’s employer at about 11am to say he had not shown up for work.
First, she called hospitals, and even at one point feared he could have run off, but she became suspicious when the authorities showed little interest and she says the police are still not doing enough to find her husband.
“No effective investigation... or procedure has been started,” she said, adding that it was “still not too late” to find him.
Human Rights Watch says the six men taken in February were “forcibly disappeared” and the four who re-emerged have been denied lawyers.
It said their wives had described them as traumatized.
Turkish lawmaker Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party who spearheaded a social media campaign to try to find the six, said he believed they had been tortured.
“They were in a wretched state. When the families asked where they had been, the men said: ‘Close this issue, leave it alone,’” Gergerlioglu said.
Those who took them wanted “to interrogate them for a long time,” he added.
The four men have since been formally charged over suspected Gulen links.
“I assume that the goal here is to spread terror” among suspected Gulen supporters, Turkish Human Rights Association head Ozturk Turkdogan said. “Obviously, our main suspect is the state.”
Turkdogan said the disappearances often followed a similar pattern, particularly the use of black Volkswagen Transporters, according to CCTV images or witnesses.
No comment was provided by the public prosecutor’s office and police in Ankara, while the Turkish Ministry of the Interior did not respond to requests.
Cases of missing people have been rare in Turkey since the 1990s and activists are concerned by the rising number since 2016.
Since the four men’s reappearance, another case has come to light.
The family of father-of-three Yusuf Bilge Tunc, 35, have said that he was taken by unknown individuals on Aug. 6.
Tunc was accused of Gulen ties — claims that he denied — and fired from his job at the agency overseeing the Turkish Ministry of National Defense.
His family says police claim to have no information on his whereabouts, but that one officer suggested he had run off.
“For the sake of argument, let’s say that there was a problem between us ... why would he not say anything to his parents?” asked Tunc’s wife, who did not wish to be named. “The most painful thing in the world is not knowing what has happened to him.”
Like Sumeyye Yilmaz, she has appealed for help from the European Court of Human Rights and the UN.
Tunc’s wife also claimed police had not bothered to search his vehicle when it was found four days after he went missing.
“I never thought this kind of thing could happen to us,” she said.
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