COPENHAGEN, Denmark – A Kurdish father, protesting against a 10-year prison sentence handed down for murder to his teenage son in Denmark, has drawn a great deal of attention in the Danish media.
With a sign next to him, Ali Riza Sahbaz is on a hunger strike, spending nights at one of the busiest railway stations in the country, close to the capital, Copenhagen. The Kurd believes that his son, 17-year-old son, Hikmet, was wrongly convicted in a murder trial.
"My son is not a murderer. He's been falsely convicted and I am on hunger strike to highlight the unjust sentence,” Sahbaz told Rudaw. The railway station is located at the crime scene where 19 -year-old Ricko Treholt was killed last year after being stabbed with a knife.
Last week, Hikmet was sentenced to 10 years in prison for complicity in the murder. Tugay Yalcin, 20, was given a 14-year jail term for having held the knife. Both have appealed against their convictions.
For the following 10 days Sahbaz, a Kurd from Turkey, will be spending nights at the railway station, only consuming juice and water.
"I do not trust the Danish legal system. My son has been singled out as a victim,” says a hand-written sign next to Sahbaz at the station.
Sahbaz received political asylum in Sweden, but has lived in Denmark for 18 years. He says he fled Turkey, after being tortured as a Kurdish activist following the 1980 military coup.
This is not the first time Sahbaz is on protest. He went on a hunger strike to protest prison conditions at his jail in Turkey, and later outside the UN headquarters in Stockholm to protest against Saddam Hussein's poison gas attack on Halabja in March 1988.
"The most important thing right now is my son. Our son is a victim, like the boy Ricko Treholt who was killed," said Sahbaz, who has two sons and two daughters.
Travelers at the station stop with curiosity to learn about the case, and both television and newspapers have interviewed Sahbaz.
"Many Danes come along and support us. It is an encouragement," said Sahbaz.
The victim, Ricko Treholt, was stabbed in the chest and throat twice during a scuffle with the two convicted. A surveillance video showed that the perpetrators chased their victim at the station before he was killed.
The pair was also convicted for the attempted murder of Treholt’s 16 -year-old friend, who was stabbed four times, but escaped without life-threatening injuries.
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