Per Yakay-Der records and the ruling delivered by the Constitutional Court on 21st April 2016, twenty-seven-year-old Ayten Öztürk was living in Tunceli with her family; her father worked as a civil servant in the same city. One day in May 1992, the Gendarmerie Commander summoned Öztürk’s father to his office and told him to come back with all his children. In a couple of days, the father took his three daughters to the Gendarmerie Station where they were interrogated by officers. There was another man in the room to whom Yazganarıkan referred to as “Mr. Mahmut.”

On 28th July 1992, Ayten Öztürk’s father received a phone call from her workplace; Ayten hadn’t been to work that day. Eye witnesses said that they had seen Ayten in a white vehicle with three other people. Ayten’s father applied to the police as well as the Office of the Chief Public Prosecutor but his search for Ayten remained fruitless. On 8th August 1992, Ayten Öztürk’s father received a call from the Elazığ State Hospital Morgue about an unidentified woman’s dead body. The father identified the severely body as Ayten. Doctors who completed the autopsy did not include any of the traces of torture in their report. As a result, the case was handled as a regular crime and the investigation was closed rapidly.

On 13th December 2011 Ayten Öztürk’s father gave a testimony regarding her murder to the Turkish Parliament’s Human Rights Investigation Committee. His statements found great coverage in newspapers. The head of the committee filed a criminal complaint to the Tunceli and Elazığ Public Prosecutor’s Office. The Elazığ Public Prosecutor decided to reopen Ayten Öztürk’s case and transferred the file to Malatya Special Assize Court to be investigated as an organized crime. In his testimony, a former interrogator for the police force stated that he had been told about the kidnapping and torture of Ayten Öztürk by a senior intelligence official. According to this testimony, Ayten had been kidnapped and tortured by Mahmut Yıldırım, known in the public with his codename ‘Yeşil,’ and a former PKK member-turned-informant named M.M.. Former Gendarmerie Intelligence member Abdülkadir Aygan also provided details of the killing of Ayten Öztürk in his confessions which were made public in 2012.

On 21st October 2013, as there had been no progress in the investigation, the Öztürk family applied to the Constitutional Court. On 21st April 2016, the Court decided that the article 17 (right to life, to protect and develop oneself) of the Constitution had been violated in its procedural limb and that a compensation of fifty thousand liras should be paid to the family for non-pecuniary damages.