58 Hezbollah hitmen tried for being the perpetrators of 183 murders in Diyarbakır, Mardin, and Batman and sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment were released. The higher court upheld the sentences based on the admission of the guilt and proven with evidence given by lower courts.
Fifty-eight killers involved in Hezbollah’s military structure, being the top responsible for the unsolved killings and also responsible for the deaths of 183 citizens, have been released.
According to Sözcü’s Özgür Cebe, witness statements, ballistic reports of the weapons seized, and the statements given by the captured hitmen against each other, fifty-eight Hezbollah fundamentalist religious terror organization members were found guilty at the court of law. The sentenced murderers showed their hiding places in the drills conducted before the prosecutor. They were tried on different dates and in different courts. The illegal and secret sect members were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment for “committing grave acts to overthrow the constitutional order at gunpoint and replace it with a Kurdish Islamic state model of Iran.”
The Supreme Court upheld them all: Murders proven by evidence
The Criminal Division of the Higher Court that oversees the lower court decisions unanimously decided that the evidence collected was by the law, that the defendants confessed to their crimes in their statements both in custody and before the prosecutor, and that when the eyewitnesses and the victim statements heard were considered as a whole, there was no inaccuracy in the local court decisions, and that the defendants’ appeals were rejected on the merits. On these findings, the High Court upheld the “guilty” verdicts of the suspects.
The convicted Hezbollah members, who started their sentences because the life imprisonment sentences against them were finalized, applied to the Heavy Penal Courts, which are the continuation of the closed State Security Courts and requested a retrial.
“We didn’t get a fair trial”
The convicted Hezbollah members requested a retrial claiming they were not given a fair trial because they had military judges in the State Security Courts that had convicted them, that no lawyers were present during their testimonies under custody, that they were detained for a long time under the “state of emergency law,” that they were tortured and ill-treated during this time, and that their cases were not concluded within a reasonable time.
They evacuated one by one.
The Heavy Penal Courts, which accepted these demands with jet speed, unheard of in Turkey unless it favors the government in political cases, accepted the request to renew the trial one by one through the file without even having a hearing. The court assigned new numbers to the old cases and decided to stop the execution of each convicted Hezbollah member and decided to release them.
Turkish law states, “A renewal of the proceedings cannot be made unless concrete evidence is produced at a level that affects the merits of a case.”
As in the previous releases, the release of Hezbollah convicts coincided with HUDA PAR’s decision to support Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the presidential elections on June 24, 2018. Other release dates were suspiciously close to when the HUDA PAR party declared that it would not field candidates in the March 31, 2019, local elections and would support AKP candidates in the Southeast.
HUDA PAR is a religious fundamentalist party closely related to the Hizbullah terror organization. A few days ago, when, again, HUDA PAR supported Erdogan’s Islamic fundamentalist ruling party AKP, a court order banned the publication of the terrorist Hezbollah organization’s crimes.
According to Turkish law, victims and complainants in the case should be notified when the convicts are released. However, the families of the murdered or the injured by the religious fanatics in the case were not notified of the releases and thus prevented from appealing to the higher court against the eviction.
Source: Sözcü
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