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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Selahattin Demirtas, the jailed former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) was sentenced on Friday to two and a half years for comments made about a former Turkish prosecutor, said during a court hearing in 2020.
“While not a single investigation has been opened into grave allegations that come to light every day, for saying, ‘You will pay for all of this before the judiciary,’ Selahattin was handed a two-year six-month sentence,” the politician’s wife, Basak Demirtas, tweeted on Friday.
The former HDP leader had addressed the remarks to Yuksel Kocaman during a trial in January 2020. Kocaman was then the chief prosecutor in Ankara but he was appointed to the Court of Cessation in November the same year, according to the independent Duvar News Outlet.
“Yuksel Kocaman, there is Allah who is greater than the [Presidential] Palace in which you trust. The wheel is going to turn, and when elections happen, you will be laughing on the other side of your face. You will give an account of all this before the judiciary,” Demirtas had said.
Demirtas, who has been in jail for alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) since November 2016, has been tried several times for different cases since then. He and over a hundred other people, mostly from the HDP, are being tried for allegedly encouraging a nationwide, deadly protest in 2014 in solidarity with the Kurdish city of Kobane in Syria, which was then under Islamic State (ISIS) attack. The protesters accused Ankara of standing by as the city was besieged.
The politician attended his final hearing in the trial on Friday via video link. The court decided to sentence him to two and a half years for “targeting a public official serving in the counterterrorism office,” according to Duvar.
His lawyers’ demands for his release and for his sentence to be reduced have been rejected.
He faces up to 142 years in jail if the terror-related charges against him are finalized.
“While not a single investigation has been opened into grave allegations that come to light every day, for saying, ‘You will pay for all of this before the judiciary,’ Selahattin was handed a two-year six-month sentence,” the politician’s wife, Basak Demirtas, tweeted on Friday.
The former HDP leader had addressed the remarks to Yuksel Kocaman during a trial in January 2020. Kocaman was then the chief prosecutor in Ankara but he was appointed to the Court of Cessation in November the same year, according to the independent Duvar News Outlet.
“Yuksel Kocaman, there is Allah who is greater than the [Presidential] Palace in which you trust. The wheel is going to turn, and when elections happen, you will be laughing on the other side of your face. You will give an account of all this before the judiciary,” Demirtas had said.
Demirtas, who has been in jail for alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) since November 2016, has been tried several times for different cases since then. He and over a hundred other people, mostly from the HDP, are being tried for allegedly encouraging a nationwide, deadly protest in 2014 in solidarity with the Kurdish city of Kobane in Syria, which was then under Islamic State (ISIS) attack. The protesters accused Ankara of standing by as the city was besieged.
The politician attended his final hearing in the trial on Friday via video link. The court decided to sentence him to two and a half years for “targeting a public official serving in the counterterrorism office,” according to Duvar.
His lawyers’ demands for his release and for his sentence to be reduced have been rejected.
He faces up to 142 years in jail if the terror-related charges against him are finalized.
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