University student brutally raped, murdered by businessman

ANTALYA

Turkey mourns for a 21-year-old university student who was raped and murdered and her body chopped into pieces by a 48-year-old businessman in the southern province of Antalya.

“She wanted to be a journalist to write stories and stand against femicides in Turkey, but she ended up becoming a victim herself,” a relative told about the brutal killing of Azra Gülendam Haytaoğlu.

According to police reports, Haytaoğlu left the house she was sharing with her elder sister on July 28 after the two women fought over the university student’s positive COVID-19 test.

In her last phone call with her sister, Haytaoğlu said, “I am in a cafe with a man” and went missing after the call. Police identified the man as Mustafa Murat Ayhan, a 48-year-old businessman who has a real estate agency in the province.

Ayhan was released after his testimony, saying, “We had a few drinks together, then I went home.”

Police officials monitored all the CCTV footage around his house and saw the man entering the house with Haytaoğlu, leaving the apartment with a suitcase and then returning home without the suitcase.

In the footage, Haytaoğlu was never seen leaving the house she entered with the man.

Ayhan confessed the murder during his second police interrogation.

Confessing that he sexually abused the university student, he said: “I killed her as she shouted. Then I chopped the body in the bathroom into five pieces, put them in a suitcase and buried it in forestland.”

The police found the body parts except for the woman’s head in the forestland.

“The killer wrote his name on the woman’s body with a razor,” a police source said.

“His father wanted her to be a teacher. But she chose to study journalism in the university to become a journalist and defend women’s rights in her stories. She became a victim,” Mine Haytaoğlu, the victim’s aunt, told daily Hürriyet on Aug. 3.

“The bigotry you call love will take one’s life in our house. And when everything’s finished, we will be precious, like everyone,” wrote the university student on her last tweet on April 21, referring to femicides.

Some 82 women were murdered only in the first 81 days of 2021, according to the Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu (We Will Stop Femicide Platform), a women’s rights organization that monitors violence against women.