The revelations of the “birgün” opposition daily question question on the impunity from which religious brotherhoods benefit from power benefit.
by Angèle Pierre (Istanbul, Correspondence)
It took Turkish justice two years to stop the main suspects in the 6 -year -old girl’s forced marriage case. On December 15, the press published the photographs of Yusuf Ziya Gümüsel and Kadir Istekli, the father and the “husband” of the victim, the slaughtered air, descendant of the stairs supervised by police officers.
A young woman known under the initials H. K. G. had filed a complaint in 2020. Daughter of the leader of the Hiranur Vakfi Foundation, attached to the powerful Religious Driving Ismailaga, she accuses her father of having married him religiously in her childhood at the ‘One of his 29 -year -old disciples in the early 2000s, and explains that he had suffered sexual abuse.
Yusuf Ziya Gümüsel and Kadir Istekli could have been released if the investigation journalist Timur Soykan had not revealed the case in the pages of the left daily Birgün. The sordid extracts of the deposition reveal acts of pedophilia with the downstream of the victim’s parents: “Kadir caressed my body (…). I cried and Kadir said that we were married. He said we were Married as my parents were. He said, “You are my wife, I am your husband. Married people play such games, but this game is not revealed to anyone. Listen, your father and your mother say it to no one, “he said. My father and my mother called Kadir” my son-in-law “, reports the article by Birgün.
Despite the report of a doctor suspecting the marriage of a minor in 2012 and the opening of an investigation by the prosecution, several irregularities make the progress of the file skate. The family had managed to pass the bone test aimed at establishing the age of H.K. G. by an older young woman in order to avoid legal proceedings. The father rejects the accusations of religious marriage at the age of 6, but photographs broadcast in the press, which show little H. K. G. dressed in a white dress, maintain doubt.
political resonance
“The politicians who frequently went to the Ismailaga sect played a role in this case?” Asks the journalist. Since the publication, reporter Timur Soykan has been accused of insulting Islam and is today the subject of lynching on social networks. The first hearing of the trial was put forward on January 30, 2023. The husband and parents of H. K. G., now in his twenties, face seventy and twenty-two years of imprisonment.
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