Court gives five times aggravated life sentences to serial killer

ORDU

A Turkish court on Feb. 25 handed down five sentences of aggravated life imprisonment plus an additional 24 years in jail to a man who implicated in up to 12 murders mainly targeting elderly couples.

At the trial’s final hearing at a courthouse in the Black Sea province of Ordu’s Ünye district, Mehmet Ali Çayıroğlu, who is accused of killing 12 people by burning them alive, pled not guilty to the charges.

The court convicted Çayıroğlu for the “deliberate murders” of five elderly people and “qualified looting” on the grounds that he stole his victims’ belongings.

He was acquitted of another murder case due to lack of evidence and a separate trial is pending for the death of another man in Akkuş district.

Another investigation is ongoing into whether the suspect was involved in the February 2018 deaths of an elderly woman and her two daughters in a village in Samsun.

Çayıroğlu, who went to mountain villages on the pretext of buying animals for his farm, identified defenseless or old people living alone. Later, he started to enter the houses of his victims by wearing a military uniform.

Downloading a radio voice application on his smartphone to make the soldier in disguise believable, Çayıroğlu tied the victims with plastic handcuffs and seized their animals, money and gold in the meantime.

Çayıroğlu made some of his murders look like accidents by turning on the gas used for heating in homes or he set fire to the houses and watched the victims burn alive, according to the indictment.