A criminal court in January released two former military officers and an Islamic university researcher who had been jailed for nearly four years on suspected involvement in the 2007 murders of three Christians in southeast Turkey.
At the 101st hearing of the case on 21 January, the Malatya First High Criminal Court ruled that the three men – Ret. Col. Mehmet Ulger, Maj. Haydar Yesil and Ruhi Abat – be set free pending the conclusion of the trial.
Plaintiff lawyer Erdal Dogan noted that political manipulation had changed the direction of the case over the past 12 months. Together with Ret. Gen. Hursit Tolon, the accused mastermind of the murders who was set free last June, the newly released suspects now claim the deadly plot was orchestrated by the government’s former-ally-turned-nemesis, the Hizmet movement led by Muslim scholar Fetullah Gulen.
With the release of Ulger, Yesil and Abat, all but one of 20 of the men jailed in March 2011 on charges of planning the Malatya killings are now released on probation.
Life sentences without parole have been demanded for the five men accused of carrying out the plot. They were released under house arrest in March 2014 and fitted with tracking devices.
The drawn-out Malatya trial has now spanned more than seven years, with the eighth anniversary of the brutal stabbing deaths of Turkish Christians Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel and German Tilmann Geske to be commemorated on 18 April.
Hearings are scheduled to resume soon.
