Court refuses to release officer in homicide case

ESKİŞEHİR - Anatolia News Agency

A court in the Central Anatolian province of Eskişehir refused to release a police officer who has remained behind bars for a year and a half on charges of murdering Şerzan Kurt, a 21-year-old university student.
“Should the police shoot flowers instead of bullets?” policeman Gültekin Şahin’s lawyer, Erol Halka, said in court Feb. 17 and claimed the bullet that killed Kurt did not come out of the officer’s pistol.

Şahin also said the evidence was destroyed after the incident, making it impossible to clarify the case.
The incident began with a row at the university campus over girlfriends, but reports indicated the affair had to do with a dispute between left- and right-wing students. The incident was finally labeled as an ethnically motivated row between Kurds and Turks. Şahin, 45, fired his pistol to silence the crowd after arriving at the scene. Kurt was subsequently shot and bled to death in the hospital.