II. Introduction

Festus Okey d ied of a single gunshot wound on August 20, 2007, while in police custody in Istanbul. The Nigerian asylum seeker had been stopped, searched, and detained at the Beyo ğ lu district police headquarters in the late afternoon. CCTV footage from the police station shows Festus Okey being led into the station, only to be carried out 15 minutes later-he was rushed to hospital where he died. At the time of the shooting Festus Okey had been alone with a police officer who would later claim that Okey had made to grab his gun and that in the ensuing struggle the gun had gone off accidentally, killing the Nigerian detainee.

In the hours that followed, the conduct of the police demonstrates such serious failings in following basic investigative procedures and preservation of evidence as to compel a conclusion that there was a concerted attempt to cover up the incident, to rewrite the story of Festus Okey's death, and to pervert the course of justice. Instead of being called immediately, as criminal procedure law requires, the public prosecutor was called to the scene some three hours after the shooting. Amongst those who signed off on the police record of the incident was the police officer who had himself been alone with Festus Okey at the time of the shooting and would later be tried for his killing. Thus the individual implicated in the shooting incident had apparently also been given the duty of joining in the police investigation of the very same incident. [1]

Later, key evidence in the form of the vest and shirt that Festus was wearing at the time of the shooting, was mysteriously lost in the hospital where he died, as the defendant and police witnesses would later testify in court. The loss is significant because forensic examination of clothing carrying bullet hole burn marks is an important means of determining the distance from which a shot was fired. This was not the first time such evidence had been lost after a police shooting. [2] The prosecutor's preliminary investigation into the loss of Okey's clothing was concluded on March 28, 2008, with a decision that there was no case to answer given that it was not clear who had lost it. [3]

Mysteriously, as the defendant would also testify, there was no camera footage of the shooting available because it had occurred in a room on the fifth floor of the police station that allegedly did not have cameras. [4] To date the court has not conducted an onsite visit to the police station to see the site of the shooting, or requested an inventory that would have shown whether there had been a camera in the room where Okey died and thus raise the issue of whether there might have been film of the incident that might later have been deliberately erased. There were cameras in all other interrogation rooms in the station and one police witness had alleged early on that he had watched the incident via CCTV. The court also failed to query why hand swabs of the police officer implicated in the shooting of the victim had failed to show up any sign of gunpowder traces. The court has not to date pursued the question of whether the police officer might have washed his hands before hand swabs were taken. The case, which was originally to be tried as manslaughter before a court of first instance, was transferred to the Heavy Penal Court pursuant to a prosecutor's request to increase the charge to murder. [5]

Violence by law enforcement officials in Turkey and the conduct of seriously flawed investigations of such allegations are long standing problems and apparently remain entrenched. In general, cases of police violence-ranging from ill-treatment and torture to shootings-still result in a low rate of criminal prosecution. Festus Okey's alleged killer is facing trial, but in other cases investigations by prosecutors proceed at a snail's pace, generally taking many months and even years, often ending with a decision that there is no case to answer. There are still too many cases where evidence of police officers' wrongdoing is tampered with or lost. However, even in the presence of sufficient evidence (such as widely broadcast TV footage) of violent assaults on individuals by police, prosecutors may still fail to initiate investigations, despite clear obligations under human rights law to undertake an investigation whenever they receive credible information of abuse, from any source . [6]

Identifying individual police officers caught on film committing offences during public order policing has also been a difficult task for prosecutors. Dressed in riot gear, with faces often hidden by gas masks, their uniforms in recent years have carried no ID numbers or means of identification. This practice has correctly been condemned by human rights bodies, precisely because it protects alleged abusers, and is prohibited in many Council of Europe countries.[7] After the May 1, 2008, incidents described later in this report, a new project was introduced to number police helmets to permit identification.[8]This practice should be rapidly implemented throughout the police service so that it is required by law to display ID numbers when partaking in public order activities.

Where there is a prosecution, trials last for years and the rate of conviction is extremely low. Prison sentences for such crimes still remain rare and fail to be commensurate with the gravity of the crime. Aside from criminal prosecution, disciplinary measures against law enforcement personnel for crimes such as ill-treatment are rarer still.

Alper Turgut, is a senior reporter with the newspaper Cumhuriyet . His quest for accountability illustrates clearly how Turkish officialdom closes ranks against complaints of police violence. Unlike other cases featured in this report, his case is closed.

Serious police violence that took place against demonstrators, trade unionists, journalists, and others in Istanbul on May 1, 2008 (described in detail in Chapter V, below) was in fact only a more violent version of the May 1 celebrations a year earlier. On May 1, 2007, at least eight journalists had been beaten as they attempted to report events on the streets of Istanbul . Alper Turgut's case was typical. He recounted that as police approached him he had produced his press card, to which a police officer had responded "very good" and preceded to spray pepper gas directly into his face, kick him in the testicles, and beat him with a truncheon. Two other journalists, Aynur Çolak and Beraat Günçıkan, witnessed the incident. [9]

Turgut viewed the treatment of journalists as evidence of a deep antipathy to the press among the police from top to bottom, commenting, "The fact is, given their very hierarchical structure, if the police don't get the order from above, they can't behave like this." [10]

Turgut immediately lodged a complaint with the public prosecutor against the Istanbul governor, the chief of the Istanbul Security Directorate, the head of the rapid deployment force, and those (unidentified) police officers responsible, including a medical report recording signs of ill-treatment. Ten months later he learned that there were to be neither criminal proceedings nor disciplinary measures against a single police officer.

The Law on Trials of Civil Servants makes it obligatory to secure permission in order to investigate public officials for misconduct (except in cases of torture or ill-treatment). [11] Because of the seniority of those named in the complaint (the governor, etc.), permission to investigate was referred to the Court of Cassation. The Court of Cassation's chief prosecutor refused to give permission for criminal investigation of the governor, head of police, and head of the rapid deployment force on the grounds of insufficient evidence of misconduct. Turgut and the two witnesses to the attack were interviewed by Ministry of Interior inspectors. On January 10, 2008, Alper Turgut learnt that, on the advice of the Istanbul Security Directorate, permission to investigate the (unidentified) police officers who attacked him had also not been granted by the Governor's office, and that the decision had been made without him being informed over five months earlier, on July 27, 2007. On March 12, 2008, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor separately reached the decision that there was no case to answer in 38 complaints of police ill-treatment-including that of Alper Turgut-and that, among other reasons, in no case was there "sufficient, sure, and convincing" evidence of disproportionate force by the police. [12]

However, Istanbul's Ninth Administrative Court reached a different verdict on April 21, 2008, judging that there was "no doubt that [Alper Turgut] had been ill-treated by the security forces", and awarded him the symbolic sum of 1000 Turkish lira (US$820), for which he had applied as token compensation. [13]