Lieutenant Colonel Levent Türkkan, former aide-de-camp to Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar, has told an Ankara court that a statement attributed to him after the 2016 coup attempt was obtained while he was suffering severe physical abuse.
Türkkan spoke on May 23 during the trial of 221 defendants accused over events at General Staff headquarters. The case is being heard by the Ankara 17th High Criminal Court at the Sincan prison complex.
“None of my statement was genuine,” Türkkan said, according to contemporaneous courtroom reporting. “My whole body was battered. They put me on an IV and scanned my head.”
The brief intervention directly challenged the reliability of a custodial statement publicized by the state-run Anadolu Agency shortly after the coup attempt.
That statement quoted Türkkan as saying that he had belonged to the Gülen movement for years, had followed instructions from senior members and had advance knowledge of the attempted takeover. It also contained accusations against numerous other military officers.
The Turkish government subsequently treated Türkkan’s purported confession as important evidence for its allegation that the Gülen movement organized the coup attempt. The movement denies any involvement, and the government’s account has not been established through an independent and transparent investigation.
Photographs showed extensive injuries
Photographs circulated alongside reports of Türkkan’s initial statement showed extensive bruising and injuries to his face, torso, shoulders and hands. The images raised immediate concerns about the conditions under which he had been interrogated.
Photographs alone cannot establish precisely how every injury occurred. Combined with Türkkan’s statement in open court, however, they require an independent investigation into who held and questioned him, what medical treatment he received and whether coercion was used to obtain or alter his testimony.
Türkkan’s allegation is not isolated from the broader conditions prevailing after the coup attempt. In July 2016, Amnesty International reported credible evidence that detainees had been subjected to beatings, stress positions, sexual assault and other forms of torture in official and unofficial detention facilities. Human Rights Watch also documented the removal of safeguards intended to protect detainees from abuse.
The courtroom reports do not indicate that an immediate independent investigation was ordered after Türkkan described the circumstances surrounding his statement.
Evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible under both Turkish and international law. A statement made under such conditions cannot credibly establish either the speaker’s guilt or the guilt of the people named in it.
