A single-physician report issued by the Ministry of Health’s Başakşehir Çam and Sakura City Hospital at 10:12 this morning records the following. Abdullah Tırpan, born 18 April 1953, was admitted to General Intensive Care Unit 1 on 25 October. His general condition is poor. He is orotracheally intubated. He is receiving invasive mechanical ventilation support. There is danger to his life.

He is 73. He is a prisoner. He has been in prison since February 2025, serving seven years and six months imposed in the prosecutions of the Gülen movement, and he was held at Metris R Type Closed Prison in Istanbul until his health collapsed.

The sequence took six days. He was admitted to hospital on Tuesday 20 October, when doctors obtained his family’s consent to amputate. On the night of Thursday his left leg was taken off below the knee, at one in the morning. The infection had already spread above the amputation and a second operation was raised; it is not clear whether it was ever performed. On Sunday he was moved to intensive care and intubated.

His daughter, Esra Yakut Tırpan, has been publishing what the family knows, because for most of the week nobody told them anything.

On Sunday morning she wrote: “My brother called this morning. My father’s condition has worsened and they are not giving us information about it. My brother saw from e-Nabız that he is in intensive care.” The family found out that their father was in intensive care by logging into the state’s own patient portal.

Later the same day: “A blood gas measurement was taken. Three hours apart, the result had unfortunately become much worse. We learned his condition by asking another doctor about the test results.” She addressed the next line to the Forensic Medicine Institution and the Ministry of Justice: “Are you waiting for him to die before you issue that report? Shame on you.”

Then: “My father’s heart stopped in intensive care, they forced it to work with drugs, but he has no respiration. He is on a ventilator.” She ended by wishing on the officials she tagged the pain her family is living through. To TR724 she said simply: “Pray. There is nothing left to do anyway.”

The report she refers to is the one that decides everything. Article 16 of Law No. 5275 allows the execution of a sentence to be deferred where imprisonment poses a definite danger to the person’s life, or where serious illness means he cannot sustain his life alone in prison conditions and poses no serious and concrete danger to public security. The decision belongs to the chief public prosecutor’s office. But it rests on a hospital board report that must be approved by the Forensic Medicine Institution.

According to TR724, the Forensic Medicine Institution has already given its view in this case. It reported that Tırpan could remain in an R type prison notwithstanding his serious health problems. No date has been published for that report.

That is the whole of the matter. The body whose approval the statute requires assessed a 73-year-old wheelchair user with advanced diabetes and peripheral vascular disease and concluded that prison conditions were survivable for him. His leg was amputated three days ago. He is now on a ventilator with his heart restarted by drugs, and a state hospital has certified in writing that his life is in danger.

There is one earlier date that belongs in the file. In February, when he began having difficulty speaking, a brain MRI was ordered. It was performed about four months later and found serious narrowing of the vessels in his brain and a risk of stroke.

Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, the DEM Party MP for Kocaeli who published this morning’s report, says he has followed the case for about twenty months and has repeatedly warned the institutions concerned without result. “A man brought to this state in plain sight is at this moment in his death throes,” he wrote. “Who is responsible for this?” He noted that with Tırpan’s condition this grave, not one public statement has been made about him. He said he is taking the steps open to him as a member of parliament and that those responsible will answer before the courts.

The Justice Ministry has said nothing.

The Human Rights Association counted at least 1,412 sick prisoners in Turkish prisons as at April 2025, 335 of them seriously ill and 230 unable to sustain their lives alone. A CHP report in July 2026 put the figures at 1,605 and 649. In May the chair of the parliamentary sub-commission on prisons told the General Assembly that 1,001 prisoners died in Türkiye in 2025.

The provision that would allow Abdullah Tırpan to be treated outside prison has been on the statute book since 2013. It requires a report from the Forensic Medicine Institution. He has one. It says he can stay.