Developments unfold in case of student imprisoned for murdering man while saving woman

KONYA

Surprising developments in the case of Kadir Şeker, a university student who was jailed for attempting to kill a man while trying to save the life of a woman, have unfolded and his trial will likely take a strange twist.

Ayşe Dırla, who was allegedly saved by Şeker while she was being beaten up by a man, was caught with 900 grams of heroin in an anti-drug operation organized by police teams in the Central Anatolian province of Konya on late Nov. 29, months after the incident which led to Şeker’s arrest.

In February 2019, Kadir Şeker, 20, heard Dırla crying when he left a library to go home, prompting him to check whether she was fine.

Seeing that she was getting beaten by her boyfriend, Özgür Duran, in a park, Şeker approached the scene to warn the man to stop, according to allegations.

Şeker and Duran got into a brawl during which Duran got stabbed in his heart.

After being arrested, the court decided to sentence Şeker to 12 years and six months in prison on charges of “deliberate murder under unjust provocation.”

But thousands of social media users had called for justice for Şeker, sending tweets with the hashtag “Kadir is innocent” (#kadirsuçsuzdur), in which people pointed to the fact that he saved a woman from getting killed.

While urging him to be freed, social media users demanded that Şeker’s act must be considered self-defense, drawing attention to femicides in the country.

But new developments that occurred on Nov. 30 are set to change the course of the case completely, raising several question marks.

Dırla was caught with 900 grams of heroin with Murat Hanlı, whom she is said to live with a religious marriage, in a police operation in Konya.

Dırla claimed that she had nothing to do with the drugs and that her partner was addicted to it, while Hanlı said that he bought the heroin worth 60,000 liras only for “use.”

The couple were arrested by the court where they were brought.

The mother and brother of the deceased Duran came to the Antalya Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office and filed a criminal complaint against Dırla.

Duran’s family claimed that Şeker was a hitman and that they proved this with documents.

“They made my son [Özgür Duran] get killed by Kadir Şeker. It is Ayşe Dırla who instigated my son’s murderer. They also took a picture of my son in the morgue. They took this to prove that Özgür was dead,” said Mübeyyen Güner Dalkılıç, the mother of the deceased.

“The whole country regarded this incident as ‘violence against woman.’ I have said many times that this is not the case,” she noted.

Özgür Duran’s brother, Niyazi Remzi Duran, claimed that his brother was killed as a result of a trap and that the knife used in the murder was given to Kadir Şeker by Ayşe Dırla.