‘Islamic hotel’ guests accuse paragliders of peeping in Turkey’s southwest

MUĞLA

The guests of an “Islamic hotel” have accused the paragliders around the hotel of peeping on them as they swam in the segregated pool for women in the Mediterranean town of Fethiye’s Ölüdeniz area. The hotel’s guests complained to the local gendarmerie about the paragliders, saying they were looking at the women in the pool as they were landing. 

“The place mentioned in the complaint is on the best route to land for us. We have no place to pass other than over the pool,” paraglider İbrahim Altın said, while adding that accidents could happen if they chose another route. 

“We need to choose the route where the number of people is the least when we are landing,” he also said. 

The women using the pool told officials the paragliders flying some 100 meters above were peeping on them. The gendarmerie then warned the paragliders against such activity. 

The paragliders said they were “annoyed” by having to deal with the women’s complaints amid the “tough days due to the decrease in the number of tourists.” 

Saying they respected religion and didn’t peep on anybody, paraglider Altın characterized the complaint as “silly.” 

“Tourism revenues fell after the recent explosions [terrorist attacks]. We are fighting for our lives here. Dealing with these silly things annoys us. A pilot focuses on landing in the moment of landing. It’s impossible for him to realize the [unrelated] factors around him. There is no possibility that we can peep on [women] during landing. It’s an unnecessary, silly complaint. As the pilots, we laughed at it,” he also said. 

Another paraglider, Hüseyin Ünal, also commented on the complaint, saying they were faced with an incident similar to “a joke.”

“This is a tragicomic event. It’s weird that a situation like this emerged in a place like Ölüdeniz,” he said.