VIDEO: Policeman killed by gunfire in southeast Turkey

DİYARBAKIR

A Turkish police officer was killed and his colleague was injured in a gun attack in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır on July 23. 

The Diyarbakır Governorate said in a written statement that according to initial findings, two masked assailants, who were aged between 20 and 25 and wearing black t-shirts, shot at two policemen, Tansu Aydın and Ali Karahan, in the Yenişehir neighborhood of Diyarbakır at 2:43 p.m. on July 23 after they were called to the area over an accident report.



“An attack has been organized by two masked terrorist, who - according to initial findings - were wearing black t-shirts and were around the age of 20 to 25, and came from a side street. As a result of the armed attack, police officer Tansu Aydın was wounded in his head, while fellow Ali Karahan was wounded in his foot and groin,” read the statement, issued around two hours after the incident. 

While both policemen were wounded seriously and immediately hospitalized, Aydın succumbed to his injuries at the Dicle University Hospital. Karahan’s treatment was continuing at the same hospital as the daily went into press. 

An operation has been launched into the incident, while security forces were deployed to the region. 

Police found 10 spent bullets casings in the area where the policemen were shot.

Earlier in the day, a ceremony was held at the Şanlıurfa Police Department for the two policemen who were killed by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on July 22. 

Two police officers, Feyyaz Yumuşak, 25, and Okan Acar, 24, in Şanlıurfa’s Ceylanpınar district near Syria were found dead with gunshot wounds to the head in their shared home on July 22.

The military wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the People’s Defence Forces (HPG), claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the men were being punished for their links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and in response to the July 20 suicide bombing in Suruç by an Islamist sympathizer that left 32 dead and around 100 injured.

Interior Minister Sebahattin Öztürk, who attended the ceremony, said the way in which the two policemen were brutally killed defied understanding.

Following the ceremony in Şanlıurfa, the two policemen were sent to their hometowns of Kırşehir and Niğde, both in Central Anatolia, to be laid to rest. 

Meanwhile, a total of six people have been detained on allegations of guiding militants to commit the assassination of the two policemen in the Ceylanpınar district. 

Initially three suspects were detained on July 23 for allegedly guiding four PKK members from the other side of border with Syria into the country, showing them the house of the police officers, and then also guided them back to the border to cross over to Syria. 

They were detained by police watching footage from surveillance cameras and signals coming from their phones. 

Later in the day three more suspects were reportedly detained in the same case, thus increasing the total detained to six. All suspects were brought to the city center of Şanlıurfa for interrogations that continued as the daily went to press. 

Ceylanpınar has been severely affected by fighting between rival factions across the border in Syria.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decried on July 22 the killing of the two policemen in a statement while vowing that Turkey was taking all necessary steps to determine the perpetrators of the murders, as well as others behind the Suruç suicide bombing.