The Kurdish lawyer Faik Candan “disappeared” on December 2, 1994 after leaving his office in the Sıhhiye district of Ankara. His body was found on the morning of December 14th by a shepherd in a ditch near an alpine pasture about 15 kilometers from the district town of Bala. Candan had been shot four times in the head, neck and chest.
A few days before his abduction by paramilitary forces, Mustafa Candan, a brother of Faik Candan, had seen a suspicious car in front of the house. The inmates: Ibrahim Şahin and Abdullah Çatlı, two contract killers of the “deep state” established under the then Prime Minister Tansu Çiller. Çatlı, a right-wing extremist mafioso and a former functionary of the paramilitary-fascist “idealist associations”, who carried out many murder assignments for the state in the 1990s and was searched for by Interpol, died in a car accident in 1996 in the western Turkish city of Susurluk together with high-ranking police and military officials. This traffic accident, which would go down in history as the “Susurluk scandal”, brought to light the deep cooperation between the state and organized crime.
At the time of his kidnapping, Faik Candan was a defense lawyer in the case of DEP MPs arrested in March 1994 from the Turkish Parliament. Among them was the future Sakharov Prize winner Leyla Zana, who remained behind bars for 15 years. Between 1991 and 1993 Candan held the office of provincial chairman of the predecessor HEP, after the party ban he headed the DEP in the Turkish capital. To this day, relatives are trying to come to terms with the extrajudicial execution of Candans, but so far without success. A laborious process in 2014 resulted in acquittals for the accused police officers. And that despite the testimony of Ayhan Çarkın, an ex-officer of a special police unit who had confessed on Turkish TV to “having killed around 1000 people in the service of the state in the fight against terror”, including his participation in the Candan Murder.
According to Çarkın’s statements, which he made on March 26, 2011 at a public prosecutor’s interrogation in Istanbul and repeated at a trial in Ankara on June 5 of the same year, Faik Candan had been interrogated by the counter-guerrilla for the first eight days after his abduction. He was then transferred to a special unit commanded by Mehmet Ağar, the then police chief and later interior minister. As it turned out later, a witness had observed the kidnapping of the lawyer. “My name is Faik Candan. I am a lawyer and am currently being abducted, ”the father of two, who was 32 years old at the time of his death, exclaimed. For years, however, the witness did not dare to go public because he feared for his own life.
Faik Candan’s family has not given up their struggle for justice. “The blood of Kurdish society sticks to the hands of this state”, it was said today at the virtual vigil against “disappearance” in the custody of the initiative of the Saturday mothers. “And as long as the hands of the Turkish state are bloody, the resistance for our dead will continue.”
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