Abdullah Tırpan is 73. He has advanced diabetes, high blood pressure, nerve damage and vascular disease, and he has used a wheelchair for a long time. He is serving a sentence of seven years and six months handed down in the prosecutions of the Gülen movement, and he has been in prison since February 2025, when the sentence became final — about twenty months.

He was held at Metris Prison in Istanbul. Some days ago he was taken to the Başakşehir Çam and Sakura City Hospital, where his condition deteriorated and doctors decided to amputate his left leg.

The operation was carried out at one o’clock this morning. The leg was taken off below the knee.

It was not enough. The infection had already spread above the site of the amputation, and he is now expected to go back into theatre for a second operation, in which the same leg will be amputated above the knee.

His daughter, Esra Tırpan Yakut, wrote this morning: “I don’t know what to say, or how to express what I feel. They took my father into surgery at one in the morning. His leg was cut below the knee. But because the infection has gone up, they are now going to operate a second time. It will be cut a second time. I am so sorry.”

She had written on 20 October, when he was admitted: “My father was hospitalised today. His leg is going to be amputated. The doctors obtained the family’s consent for the amputation. In the name of justice and humanity we are asking for a deferral of his sentence. Please be a voice for us. As a family we are in a desperate state.”

There is one date in this account that explains how a man reaches this point. In February, Tırpan began having difficulty speaking and a brain MRI was ordered. The scan was performed approximately four months later. It found serious narrowing of the blood vessels in his brain and a risk of stroke. A wheelchair-using diabetic in his seventies, with known vascular disease, waited a third of a year for a scan his doctors had already decided he needed.

Turkish law provides for exactly this situation. Article 16 of Law No. 5275 allows the execution of a sentence to be deferred where continued imprisonment poses a definite danger to the person’s life, and separately where serious illness or disability 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 where the sentence is being served, on a hospital board report approved by the Forensic Medicine Institution. Tırpan is a convicted prisoner, so the provision is available to him on its face. His family has been asking for it publicly since Monday.

He is not an isolated case. The Human Rights Association counted at least 1,412 sick prisoners in Turkish prisons as at April 2025, of whom 335 were seriously ill and 230 could not sustain their lives alone. A report by the CHP’s Zeliha Aksaz Şahbaz in July 2026 put the figures at 1,605 and 649. The association’s findings include prisoners handcuffed to hospital beds and not unshackled during examinations, and hospital referrals delayed for months.

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 let Abdullah Tırpan be treated outside prison has existed since 2013. His leg was taken off at one o’clock this morning, and the application has still not been decided.