Ahmet Bulmuş
person- Image
- Sex
- Male
- Civil status
- Married
- Date body found
- Jan 1, 1996
- Occupation
- Craftsman
- Event description
Per investigation file of the prosecutor’s office and press statement released by Cumartesi İnsanları on 22nd February 2014, Ahmet Bulmuş had a shop in the Hewler village of Şırnak. In 1992, the village was forcefully evacuated and the whole family had to move to Şırnak where he started working as a day laborer.
In April 1994, he went to a repair shop to get his radio fixed with a friend. There, after an identity check, he was abducted by three men carrying guns and a police radio. His friend and the shop owner witnessed the event. Ahmet didn’t return home after that day.
A few days later, the district gendarmerie commander went to Ahmet’s home, interrogated his wife, searched the house and asked her to show him what they were hiding in the house. After that, the house was raided by police and gendarmerie several more times until the owner of the rented house asked the Bulmuş family to find another place to live.
The wife of Ahmet Bulmuş submitted several petitions to find her husband, but did not get any response. Ahmet’s brothers went to see the Cizre Mayor who told them “Do not look for your brother anymore. Just leave it.”
In 1996, while a well was being dug in Silopi, Bulmuş’s wife identified her husband’s clothing on a decapitated body. The family was offered money to say that the PKK had killed Ahmet. When they did not agree, Ahmet’s body was not given to them and buried in a pauper’s grave in Silopi.
In 2009, Ahmet’s son made another application to the Cizre Public Prosecutor’s Office when bones were found in one of the wells dug out near the ex-military base in Botaş.
- Geolocation
Latitude: 37.332346
Longitude: 42.185474
- Geolocation
- City
- Şırnak
- District
- Cizre
- Date of disappearance
- Apr 1, 1994
- Year of disappearance
- 1994
- Age at the time of disappearance
- Yaş:48Ay:1Gün:12
- Status of the victim
- Discovered dead and buried to the cemetery of the nameless by the Municipality
- Type of source material
- Decision and correspondences of prosecutor
- Interview with family member (audio and video records)
- Press release or report of human rights organisations
- Decision by the prosecution office
- Investigation continues
- Summary of the legal proceedings
Per investigation file, in 2009, the son of Ahmet Bulmuş, who disappeared after his abduction by plainclothes men carrying walkie-talkies in 1994, filed a criminal complaint to the Cizre Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office naming the then district gendarmerie commander as suspect. The application was motivated by the discovery of bones in the vicinity of the area where in 1996 the decapitated body of Ahmet Durmuş was discovered but buried without formal identification in a pauper’s grave.
After transfer of the investigation between different prosecutor’s offices, as of 2014 it is under the jurisdiction Cizre Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office (file.no.2014/1859).
In 2009, the disappearance of Ahmet Bulmuş was also included in the case (court case no. 2009/470) involving extrajudicial killings by the former district gendarmerie commander and a gang acting under his leadership. In 2015, all the defendants were acquitted due to lack of evidence.