Preliminary autopsy report confirms girl was beaten before ‘suspicious’ death

ISTANBUL

A preliminary autopsy report of Duygu Delen, a 17-year-old girl who died under “suspicious circumstances” on Aug. 15 when she plunged to her death from the fourth floor of a building, has shown that she was beaten up.

The Delen family’s lawyer, Ömer Faruk Akan, told Demirören News Agency that she sustained traces of beatings on her body which did not occur as a result of her fall.

Akan said the family requested an independent forensic expert report into her death besides the one conducted by the Forensic Medicine Institute. He believes the death was a murder and not a suicide.

A file was sent to a specialized committee under the Forensic Medicine Institute in Istanbul from the southeastern province of Gaziantep, where she died, in order to determine the exact cause of her death, according to daily Hürriyet.

The file sent to Istanbul includes a preliminary autopsy report, witness statements, camera recordings, crime scene investigation reports, sketches, blood samples taken from the suspect, findings on Duygu’s body and other data.

The suspect, Mehmet Kaplan, had been arrested upon the order of a court on charges of “sexual abuse” and “deliberate killing” on Aug. 16.

The suspect had said that he and Delen had a verbal argument while they were at home, but that it turned physical later.

He claimed that he cut his hand when he hit a glass during the argument and that the death occurred while he was washing his hands in the bathroom, claiming she committed suicide.

However, security camera footage which was recording the courtyard outside the building showed Delen plunging to the ground upside down and unevenly, indicating she may have most likely been thrown out of the fourth floor.

When asked about the incident last year, when suspect Kaplan crashed his car into a woman while driving under the influence, Akan said he found the report prepared after the accident “problematic.”

Delen’s death comes amid an avalanche of reports of the deaths of many women at the hands of men in Turkey. Femicides in Turkey, where more than 239 women have already been killed so far in 2020, have become an epidemic which feminist groups say is not fought against adequately.