Esra Tırpan Yakut wrote on Tuesday that her father had been admitted to hospital and that doctors had taken the family’s consent to amputate his leg. “My strength is not enough for the heartlessness of this system,” she wrote. “Please stand beside me in the struggle I am waging for my father.”

Among the accounts she tagged was the Forensic Medicine Institute.

Abdullah Tırpan is 73. He sold meatballs in Tekirdağ for fifty-five years. He has five children and no previous convictions. He is held at Metris R Type Prison in İstanbul, in a wheelchair, unable to stand. He has advanced diabetes, high blood pressure, nerve damage that has taken the feeling from his hands and feet, severe narrowing of the vessels in his brain with a risk of stroke, and advanced gangrene in his left leg, which when an MP visited him on 8 October had three dressed areas and two open wounds more than ten centimetres across.

He has been assessed four times in ten months.

In December 2025 the Forensic Medicine Institute found no medical objection to his remaining in prison. In May 2026 the health board of Tekirdağ City Hospital reached the same conclusion. In June 2026 it reached it again. Around 6 October he was examined once more, with the same result; one of the reports states that he can meet his daily needs without assistance. In September the Institute had added that he could be held in an R Type prison, and he was moved to one.

Twelve days ago Mustafa Yeneroğlu, an independent MP for İstanbul, visited him at Metris. He said that holding a person in this condition in prison cannot be reconciled with conscience, and that one morning the news of a death may come.

Today his daughter was asked to consent to the removal of his leg.

The care he received before this is a matter of record. In February 2026 a neurologist asked for a brain MRI after he had difficulty speaking. The scan was carried out on 8 June, 113 days later. It showed the narrowing of his cerebral vessels and the stroke risk. In July he was hospitalised and operated on for the wounds on his feet. On 9 September he was taken to hospital for an angiogram and spent a night in intensive care, was moved to Metris the next day as a guest prisoner, and was sent back to Tekirdağ the day after that.

The sentence he is serving is seven years and six months, imposed by the Tekirdağ 3rd Assize Court on 8 August 2019 for membership of an armed terrorist organisation and upheld unanimously by the Court of Cassation on 7 March 2022. He was first detained on 16 August 2016 and taken back into custody on 25 February 2025, when the conviction became final. He has now been in prison for 602 days of this term.

What the conviction rests on is set out in our own documentation of his case. He held shares in a company that ran a licensed school. He transferred a building for use as a dormitory. He attended religious conversation meetings. He made donations. He subscribed to a newspaper. Publications were found at his home and his workplace. His children attended a licensed private school. He had an account at a licensed bank. There is no allegation that he used ByLock. The offence date recorded in the file is the day he was taken into custody. The allegation that he acted as a trustee rests on a secret witness who was never heard, and a witness who corrected his statement in open court was not relied on.

Every institution in this list was lawful when he dealt with it.

The family is asking for the execution of the sentence to be suspended so that he can be treated. “In the name of justice and humanity,” his daughter wrote, “we want a suspension of execution.”

Article 16 of Law No. 5275 provides for exactly that, where a prisoner has a severe illness or disability, cannot sustain life alone in prison conditions, and poses no grave and concrete danger to public safety, on a hospital board report approved by the Forensic Medicine Institute. The reports have been obtained four times. Each time they have said he can stay.

A man who cannot stand, cannot feel his feet, and is about to lose a leg has been certified as able to meet his daily needs without assistance.

Sources:

1- Esra Tırpan Yakut (@esrayakut21178), 20 October 2026: https://x.com/esrayakut21178/status/2112498818109354165

2- TR724, “Hasta mahpus Abdullah Tırpan’ın kızı: ‘Babamı hastaneye kaldırdılar, bacağı kesilecek’”, 20 October 2026: https://www.tr724.com/hasta-mahpus-abdullah-tirpanin-kizi-babami-hastaneye-kaldirdilar-bacagi-kesilecek/