‘Graveyard for traitors’ to be built in Istanbul for coup plotters: Mayor

ISTANBUL – Doğan News Agency

Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Mayor Kadir Topbaş has said the city ordered a space which will serve as a graveyard for the plotters of the July 15 failed coup attempt as no cemetery would accept their corpses, calling the plot “the graveyard for traitors.” 

“I ordered a space to be saved and to call it ‘the graveyard for traitors.’ The passersby will curse the ones buried there. ‘Everyone visiting the place will curse them and they won’t be able rest in their graves,’ I said,” Topbaş told a group of coup protesters gathered in Istanbul’s Taksim Square late on July 19, while adding that the mayor of the Black Sea province of Ordu had refused to provide a burial place for the coup plotters. 

“The mayor of Ordu didn’t provide a spot for their dead bodies. A family took a dead body and buried it in their garden. I congratulate the mayor,” he also said. 

Saying that the cemetery of the nameless was not a suitable place for the coup plotters to be buried as it included religious people, Topbaş noted that the putschists “won’t be saved from hell.”

“I believe that they won’t be saved from hell. But we need make the world unbearable for them,” he told the protesters. 

Topbaş also said that the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization/Parallel State Structure (FETÖ/PDY), which the government says masterminded the failed coup attempt, abused the uniforms of the soldiers with an intention to kill people.

“We are seeing a terrorist organization that points guns against their own people. They transformed into soldier looking demons and intended to kill people,” he also said. 

Also on July 19, Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) issued a statement, saying it would not offer religious funerary services, including funeral prayers, for soldiers involved in the failed coup attempt, except for those who had been “forcibly dragged.”

In the announcement, Diyanet said there had been many questions recently over the funeral prayers of the coup attempters and therefore it was found necessary to publish a statement regarding the issue. 

Saying that funeral prayers were reserved for believers who died and that blessing were given for the deceased during the prayers, the statement added the coup plotting soldiers did not deserve the blessings of the believers, as they “not only put individuals’ laws under their feet but the whole nation’s with the actions they were involved in” and therefore religious funerary services would not be provided for these people. 

The statement, however, excluded the soldiers and security personnel who were “dragged into the incidents forcibly and by threat, who found themselves in the clashes without knowing what was going on” from its decision on the practice.