Two arrested in child abuse case

ISTANBUL

In the child abuse case, which has shaken the entire country, the victim’s father, who forced her into marriage when she was just 6 years old, and the sect member she was forcibly married to have been arrested.

The allegations came to the country’s agenda and caused a bombardment of cursing posts on social media platforms when a daily published the story on Dec. 3.

The woman, identified only by the initials H.K.G., accused her father, Yusuf Ziya Gümüşel, the head of the Hiranur Foundation affiliated with İsmailağa Jamia, of forcibly marrying her to a 29-year-old sect member, Kadir İstekli, in 2004 when she was just six.

The prosecutor asked for a prison sentence of over 67 years for İstekli with charges of “child abuse” and “sexual assault.” Another 22-and-a-half-year prison sentence was asked for each of H.K.G.’s parents on the charge of “sexual harassment of children.”

The lawyers of the H.K.G. and the Family and Social Services Ministry demanded the arrest of the pending defendants İstekli and Gümüşel.

An Istanbul court decided to issue an arrest warrant for the defendants due to the nature of the crime charged against them, the expert report, the lower and upper penalty limits foreseen in the law for the crime, the suspicion of escape and the current evidence.

İstekli and Gümüşel, who were taken into custody, were referred to the courthouse after their procedures at the police station and were arrested. 

The first hearing of the lawsuit, first scheduled on May 22, 2023, was moved up by four months to Jan 30, 2023.

The first investigation into the case started in 2012 and was closed after the report of a bone age test at the hospital, as the statement given by H.K.G. was also one of the reasons that ended the investigation.

H.K.G. claimed that someone else was put through the bone age test instead of her in 2012, adding that the statement in this investigation was not her own, but that her family had her sign a statement they prepared.

Gümüşel family denied the allegations, saying that H.K.G. is suffering from some mental illnesses.

Her two sisters testified that they “never heard their father asking any of the sisters to marry at early ages.”

“My daughter was engaged at the age of 16 and legally married at 18. She was mentally depressed after suffering a miscarriage. She was talking fantasia,” H.K.G.’s mother, Fatma Gümüşel, alleged.

The case, also causing outrage on social media, came to the parliament’s agenda on Dec. 7, when Sera Kadıgil, a Workers’ Party of Türkiye (TİP) deputy, filed motions to six ministries.