420 inmates committed suicide in Turkish jails since 2006: Report

The records showed that from 2006 until 2014, the year which witnessed a peak in the number of inmates’ suicides, a total of 301 people committed suicide, 287 of whom were judicial convicts, 11 of whom were terror convicts and three of whom were organized criminal gang members.  

Some 53 of 158,837 total convicts committed suicide in 2014. Forty-eight of them were judicial convicts, four were terror convicts and another was a member of an organized crime gang.

Cem Garipoğlu – a convict serving a 24-year jail sentence for murdering his 17-year-old girlfriend in a case that made national headlines – committed suicide on Oct. 10, 2014.

The murder case stayed in the spotlight for months after Garipoğlu, who came from a wealthy family with numerous business interests, successfully evaded police for 197 days after Münevver Karabulut’s body was found dismembered in a garbage can in an upmarket Istanbul neighborhood in 2009.

Karabulut’s family launched a huge campaign to bring Garipoğlu to justice at the time as the violence of the murder shocked the country.

The data also revealed that the number of culprits who committed the act was 46 in 2015 and 20 in 2016.