A scuffle broke out in a courtroom at the Sincan Prison Campus in Ankara after former Air Force commander Gen. Akın Öztürk and former Staff Col. Ahmet Özçetin delivered their defense statements in one of the major trials stemming from Turkey’s July 15, 2016 coup attempt.
The hearing, held by the Ankara 17th High Criminal Court, was marked by tension between relatives of defendants and families of people killed during the coup attempt.
Öztürk, a former member of the Supreme Military Council, was accused by prosecutors of playing a leading role in the coup attempt, an allegation he denied.
Özçetin, a former staff colonel, also presented his defense during the first hearing of the trial.
After the defense statements were completed, Presiding Judge Oğuz Dik announced that the day’s session had ended and that proceedings would resume the next day.
According to CNN Türk, a verbal argument broke out as the courtroom was being emptied.
The argument quickly escalated into a confrontation between defendants’ relatives and families of people killed on the night of the coup attempt.
Police officers intervened and formed a barricade between the two groups as they moved toward each other.
Water bottles were thrown from the benches where families of those killed during the coup attempt were seated toward the area reserved for defendants’ relatives.
The incident reflected the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the first major coup-attempt trials, where defendants, victims’ families and the government’s official narrative confronted competing accounts of what happened on July 15.
The trial was closely watched because it included senior military figures, including Öztürk, whose alleged role became one of the most disputed issues in post-coup proceedings.
Defense lawyers and defendants in several related cases later argued that courts failed to properly examine the chain of command, the conduct of senior officers and contradictions in the official account of the night.
