Lawyers of ISIL suspects withdraw from trial

NİĞDE

Lawyer Nail Gündüz. DHA

A court has postponed to June 17 the trial of suspected Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (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.

The defendants’ lawyers said they did not want to plead and left the court room.

This is 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.

“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 animals nor human beings,” defense lawyer Nail Gündüz told reporters after the hearing.

All assailants, including German citizen Benjamin Xu, Swiss citizen Çendrim Ramadani and Macedonian citizen Muhammed Zakiri, are suspected of being members of ISIL.

The three defendants who are participating in the hearing through videoconference left all questions of chief judge unanswered and did not speak during the hearing.

Suspect Fuad Mövsümöv, who was asked to secure a lawyer in a previous hearing, said no attorney had accepted his demand. He refuted the accusation of being a member of an organization.

The plaintiffs demanded that the court bring the defendants to the Niğde Courthouse for the upcoming hearing.

Ali Çil, the lawyer of the family of killed truck driver Turan Yaşar, suggested that the case had been deliberately postponed until after the upcoming parliamentary elections.