Lawyer of femicide perpetrators sentenced for leaking documents

ANKARA

A lawyer has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for obtaining and sharing the private messages and confidential school transcripts of a woman who was the victim of a high profile femicide.

Levent Ekmen, a lawyer for the two defendants convicted in the case regarding the murder of Şule Çet, was sentenced by an Ankara court for presenting the transcript of the young woman’s school grades and her prescription as evidence to prove that she was “suicidal.”

The court has decided that Ekmen had committed the crime of “unlawfully obtaining and disseminating personal data” and sentenced the lawyer to three years in prison initially, but then reduced the sentence due to his positive attitude at the hearings.

Çet, a 23-year-old woman who had agreed to meet with Çağatay Aksu in search of a job at that time with the hope that she would find one, was found dead after being pushed down 66 meters from the 20th floor of a skyscraper in Ankara’s upscale Çankaya district in 2018.

The defendant’s lawyer, Ekmen, claimed the incident was a suicide, presenting a highly confidential document written five years ago showing that the young woman was prescribed a very little amount of antidepressant.

Although Ekmen claims that Çet was suicidal, forensic evidence reports showed the opposite. The reports also showed that Çet was forced into sexual intercourse before her murder.

Eventually, the court gave life sentences and twelve-and-a-half years of imprisonment for Aksu, who was convicted on charges of “deliberate killing,” “aggravated sexual assault,” “deprivation of liberty” and “destroying evidence of crime.”

The court ruling also noted that Aksu sexually assaulted Çet, subsequently battered, killed and threw her off the skyscraper and tampered with evidence, trying to frame it as a suicide.

Sayit Aksu, the father of the defendant, who was heard as a witness at the hearing, claimed that they gave the confidential documents belonging to Çet to the lawyer themselves.

“There was a business that we took over. We laid off the employees there. Çet was one of the former employees, but we didn’t fire her because she needed the money,” he said, adding that the documents were included in this file “somehow.”

Taking into account the defense of the accused and the witness statements, the court decided to file a criminal complaint against Sayit Aksu, and the mother of the defendant, Gülümser Aksu, to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office.

The duo will appear in court in the coming months if an indictment is prepared and accepted.