On 11 September 2020, soldiers on an operation in the Çatak district of Van detained two villagers: Servet Turgut, 55, a father of seven, and Osman Şiban, 50, a father of eight. Their families were not informed. Two days later both were found in the intensive care unit of the Van Regional Training and Research Hospital. Turgut died on 30 September 2020, after nineteen days.

Six years to the day after his death, the Mezopotamya news agency has obtained the report prepared on him by the Forensic Medicine Institute. The report is annotated “on Servet Turgut’s injury after being brought down from the helicopter”.

According to the report as published, Turgut arrived at hospital unconscious and in a critical condition. His breathing had stopped; he was intubated and revived with cardiac massage and artificial respiration. The report records widespread haemorrhaging consistent with very severe blows to the scalp, face and area around the eyes, fractures of the upper jaw, serious bleeding between the membranes of the brain and on its surface, and swelling of the brain.

It records eleven fractured or displaced ribs, seven on the right side of the chest and four on the left, with blood in the left lung and both pleural cavities, contusion injuries to the lungs, haemorrhage to the right adrenal gland and damage to the kidneys.

Its conclusion records multiple fractures of the ribs and lumbar vertebrae, displacement of the bones of the neck, severe cerebral haemorrhage and the organ failure that followed, and states that Turgut was kept alive for nineteen days entirely by drugs and machines until his body gave out and his heart failed. The Institute concluded that his death resulted from fractures to the head, face and skull, the multiple rib fractures, cerebral haemorrhage, collapse of the lung and cold-induced tissue death in his toes, together with the organ failure these produced.

Mezopotamya reports that during the investigation a committee was formed and a senior military officer took statements from the forty soldiers who had gone on the operation. According to the agency, those statements confirmed that Turgut and Şiban were put aboard the helicopter uninjured, and that before it reached the landing pad they were thrown into the midst of hundreds of soldiers and beaten.

No one has been charged. The confidentiality order on the investigation file has not been lifted in six years, and applications by the lawyers against it have produced no result.

Osman Şiban, who survived, was sentenced by the Mersin 2nd High Criminal Court on 11 April 2023 to seven years and six months for membership of an organisation. The 2nd Criminal Chamber of the Adana Regional Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal and upheld the sentence. Proceedings were also brought against the journalists who reported the incident.

Hamit Koçak, lawyer in the case, said the investigation continues but remains subject to a confidentiality and restriction order. As counsel for the victims, he said, they consider that no effective investigation has been carried out and that their clients’ right to a fair trial has been violated, and they have no confidence that the investigation will advance or that those responsible will be identified. He called on the Directorate for the Investigation of Unsolved Crimes, established within the Justice Ministry’s General Directorate of Criminal Affairs, to take up the file.

Naif Turgut, Servet Turgut’s brother, said the two men were villagers who had been in the fields when the operation took place, that they were put on the helicopter and taken away, and that the family heard nothing for three days. He said doctors told the family that every bone in his brother’s body had been broken, and that they were not allowed to see him.

Six years after his death, the medical record of how Servet Turgut died is public, and the only person convicted in connection with the events of that day is the man who survived them.