Missing boy’s death was ‘bad luck’: Father

ISTANBUL

Serdar Dikdik, the boy’s father, admitted that the swimming pool belonging to the family’s neighbors, where his son was found dead, was actually the first place he searched on April 4. DHA Photo

The father of a 3.5-year-old boy who was found dead in Istanbul on April 5 has described his son’s death as “bad luck, fate.”

Pamir Dikdik went missing in Istanbul on April 4, after he reportedly opened the front door of his house himself, went out to the garden and climbed over a 190 cm-high fence while his parents were still asleep at 9:30 a.m. He was found dead inside the swimming pool of a neighboring villa after a massive manhunt that took almost 30 hours.

The incident triggered a fiery debate on social media, with some tweets blaming the family, who live in the affluent Zekeriyaköy neighborhood, for negligence. Others claim that several children go missing every day in Turkey and neither the media nor the authorities pay them so much attention.

Serdar Dikdik, the boy’s father, admitted that the swimming pool belonging to the family’s neighbors, where his son was found dead, was actually the first place he searched on April 4. “I searched the pool myself completely, but couldn’t find him,” Dikdik said, adding that the 250 cm-deep water was dirty as the house was vacant at the time.

“It’s a matter of bad luck, fate ... The pool was searched a number of times, but only a diver was able to find the body,” he said.

Dikdik said he had previously witnessed the death of a worker’s child at his summer house in the western resort town of Bodrum.

“The babysitter had given me the baby, who later drowned in the pool. I took him to the hospital and then waited for prosecutors in the morgue. I didn’t buy myself a house with a swimming pool because of this incident. And I was still feeling the sorrow so deeply in my heart that the neighbor’s pool was the first place I picked to search for my son,” he added.

Dikdik also thanked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for his telephone call of condolences. “The prime minister offered his condolences. I told him: ‘You lost your voice last week, I lost mine this week. God bless you for advising people to have three children, but we couldn’t even take care of one.’ We all like to see a prime minister who commiserates with people,” he said.