Musa Anter case drops as statute of limitations expires

ANKARA - Demirören News Agency

A court has decided to drop the murder trial of journalist and writer Musa Anter, who was killed in an armed attack in 1992, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

In the case with 18 defendants, mostly fugitives, Anter’s son, Dicle Anter, demanded that the case not be dropped and that the trial should continue within the scope of “crimes against humanity.”

The case of Musa Anter, which was transferred to the capital Ankara for security reasons in 2015, was merged with the JİTEM case in 2016 and the unsolved murder case of Ayten Öztürk, who was killed in 1992 and whose body that had torture marks was found two months later at the cemetery of the nameless, in 2018.

Announcing its decision after the declarations, the court decided to drop the defendants on trial within the scope of the Anter and Öztürk cases.

The court, which ruled the continuation of the trial in the JİTEM case, decided to continue the arrest warrant for the defendants tried in all three cases, and to abolish the judicial control requirement for the pending defendant Hamit Yıldırım tried in the Anter case.

JİTEM is an intelligence unit of the gendarmerie, which has never officially been recognized by the military. The alleged clandestine organization is accused of being behind dozens of unsolved murders, predominantly in the 1990s.