Turkish lawyer saying ISIL men ‘worse than beasts’ threatened

NİĞDE

A lawyer who withdrew March 5 from defending suspected Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants, saying that the defendants were “neither beasts nor human beings,” said he was threatened the very same day.

The police have now provided a guard for him, said Nail Gündüz, one of the three lawyers who withdrew from the case after being appointed by the Bar.

An unidentified person called him on the phone at 4 p.m. and asked “What kind of a lawyer are you? Why didn’t you defend them?” before threatening him, Gündüz said.

 “Defending a person, even an animal, is a blessed thing. Everybody has the right to be defended, lawyers cannot avoid this. But these defendants are neither beasts nor human beings,” Gündüz had told reporters after the hearing.

A court has postponed to June 17 the trial of suspected ISIL militants who attacked a Turkish gendarmerie post in the Central Anatolian province of Niğde, after the lawyers of the defendants withdrew from the trial on March 5.

This was the third delay of the hearing into the case of 11 suspects in a shooting attack that left three dead and five injured, including a Turkish gendarmerie soldier and a police officer, on March 20, 2014.

All assailants, including German citizen Benjamin Xu, Swiss citizen Çendrim Ramadani and Macedonian citizen Muhammed Zakiri, are suspected of being members of ISIL. They attend the hearings via video conference due to security measures.