Abdülkerim Kalkan
person- Image
- Sex
- Male
- Civil status
- Married
- Date body found
- May 1, 1994
- Occupation
- Peasant
- Dependants
- 5
- Event description
Per documents included in the investigation file, which was launched following the family’s application to the Cizre Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office; Abdülkerim Kalkan was living in the Mehmidi (İnciköy) village of Şırnak’s Cizre county with his wife and four children. He went to the Gendarme Command in May 1994 to pick up his ID which had been taken away from him two weeks before during a raid by the gendarme to the village. The mukhtar of the village and his son-in-law, who accompanied him to the gendarmerie station, were also with him and they returned home the same evening. Abdülkerim, however, did not return from the gendarme battalion that evening nor in the following days.
His wife Z. Kalkan searched for him but he was nowhere to be found. Two months later she found remains of some clothing near a bridge just outside the village which she thought belonged to her husband. There, an unidentified man was bombed on 9th of June 1994. Years later in 2007, Z. Kalkan filed a petition for effective investigation into her husband’s disappearance and learned about the bombing but she could not identify her husband since only an autopsy photo of some body parts and a piece of shoe were available in the investigation file. Kalkan family learned that Abdülkerim’s bodily remains were buried in a common grave in Cizre but they were never able to locate the specific grave since there were no records kept.
- Geolocation
Latitude: 37.332346
Longitude: 42.185474
- Geolocation
- City
- Şırnak
- District
- Cizre
- Date of disappearance
- May 1, 1994
- Year of disappearance
- 1994
- Age at the time of disappearance
- Yaş:34
- Status of the victim
- Discovered dead and buried to the cemetery of the nameless by the Municipality
- Type of source material
- Interview with family member (audio and video records)
- Press release or report of human rights organisations
- Printed or online news
- Decision by the prosecution office
- Unknown
- Summary of the legal proceedings
Per documents included in the investigation file; in 2007, the wife of Abdülkerim Kalkan, who had disappeared in May 1994 after entering the Cizre District Gendaremerie Command in order to retrieve his ID, made a criminal complaint to the Cizre Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office about the military staff responsible for her husband’s disappearance. Per Gendarmerie’s account, the visitor log books and the records of staff tasked with custody proceedings had been destroyed, rendering the investigation impossible. However, in 2009, following claims made by secret witnesses a wide-scope investigation (file no. 2009/906) was launched by the Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office into extra-judicial killings committed in the area between 1993 and 1995 by a gang formed and led by the then Cizre Gendarmerie Commander and Kalkan’s case was merged with this investigation.
During this time, Kalkan’s case was linked to a bomb-related death that had occured on the night of 9th of June 1994 near the İnci/Bozalan village close to Cizre, Şırnak. The only evidence left behind was a pair of shoes and small body parts belonging to a male. At the time, without any solid proof, the investigation had been based on the presumption that the man had been killed when a land mine had exploded as he was trying to plant it for a terrorist attack. The file had been closed with a decision of non-prosecution. Per Kalkan’s wife, about two months after her husband’s disappearance, she had found burnt clothing fragments resembling Abdülkerim’s cloths near the discovery site of the unidentified man. Kalkan’s wife could not identify the body due to scarcity of the evidence retrieved from the scene and the pauper’s grave where the body was buried could not be located as no records had been kept.
Since 2014, Kalkan’ disappearance is being investigated by the Cizre Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office as an individual case under file number 2014/1859.