Hasan Basri Usta published an account on Wednesday morning of what he says was done to him. “I am exposing this,” he wrote. “In Ankara I was abducted by police in the middle of the street, blindfolded and forced into a vehicle.”

He is a student at Hacettepe University and a member of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations. He works while he studies. He was arrested in the sweep that preceded the NATO summit in Ankara and released after three months in prison.

What he describes happened after that. Returning home from work, he says, police blocked his way in a side street and put him into a black jeep. He was blindfolded and driven to high ground in Mamak, on the eastern edge of the city. He says he was held there for about three hours and subjected to beating, psychological violence and death threats.

He says they used force to take his fingerprint and open his phone. He says that while he was blindfolded they talked at him about his friends and pressed him to make accusations against them. He says they offered to make him an informant, and offered him money to give up political activity.

“Because I am a socialist, because I am a young person who struggles, I was abducted by police in the middle of the street in the capital of this country and threatened with death.”

These are his allegations. No prosecutor has examined them, and no court has ruled on them. What can be said is that the account is not unfamiliar.

In August the DEM Party MP Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu published a report documenting 73 alleged abductions and disappearances in Türkiye since 2015, assembled from the accounts of families and lawyers, court decisions, human rights reporting and visual evidence. The report is careful: it does not claim that every case on the list has been legally established. What it does record is that investigations have frequently failed either to identify those responsible or to establish what became of the missing.

Three of those people have never been found. Yusuf Bilge Tunç was taken in Ankara on 6 August 2019; it has been seven years and two months. Mustafa Özgür Gültekin disappeared in Ankara in December 2016. Ayhan Oran was last seen on 1 November 2016, ten years ago this month.

The earliest case in the report is from June 2015: Kadir Örnek, an official of the Labour Party, held for about ninety minutes and told to end his political activities.

Others came back. In April 2020 Human Rights Watch reported that it had examined sixteen cases since 2017 and that not one had been effectively investigated. Gökhan Türkmen disappeared on 7 February 2019 and reappeared in police custody on 6 November that year, having been held for 271 days at a place he was never told the name of. He told a court he had been blindfolded, handcuffed, chained at the feet and deprived of food, water and sleep, and made to copy out, sign and memorise a fifty-page statement. Mustafa Yılmaz was gone for 245 days. Mesut Geçer, a former intelligence officer, for sixteen months. Önder Asan for forty-two days. In April 2020 an Ankara prosecutor decided not to pursue the complaints.

And the method has not been reserved for one group. In February 2021 three Ankara university students — Ali Ayduğan of the Workers’ Party of Türkiye, Uğurcan Baynal of the Student Collectives, and Sena Bademli — were approached in the street by men who said they were police carrying out an identity check, put into civilian cars, beaten and threatened, and dropped in Gölbaşı, Pursaklar and Sincan. The Ankara police directorate said they appeared in neither the custody records nor the hospital records. Baynal was told not to attend the Boğaziçi protests again.

The Human Rights Association puts the number of victims of enforced disappearance in Türkiye since 1980 at 1,388.

What distinguishes the account published on Wednesday is how ordinary its purpose was. Nobody was made to vanish for months. There was no secret site and no fifty-page statement. There was a car, a hillside, three hours, and a proposition: inform on your friends, take the money, stop.

Three hours is enough. That is the point of it. A person released from prison three weeks earlier is shown that the street is not safer than the cell, and that the next time there need be no warrant, no record and no address.

The sweep he was first caught in produced 103 arrests on 23 June, out of 209 people detained in a single day, two weeks before the summit. The charge was membership of an armed terrorist organisation. Medyascope reported at the time that the prosecutor’s letter referring them to court did not explain how, or in what way, any of them was a member of anything.

He has said he will continue. “You cannot frighten us with calls to our families, with detention and arrest, with abduction and death threats.”

The test of whether this is an allegation or a fact is an investigation. On the record of the last decade, that is the thing least likely to happen.