On the murder of Mehmet Turgut

Today the court finally began to hear testimony on the murder of Mehmet Turgut in Rostock. Such testimony had been postponed several times, the last time due to the challenges of the Zschäpe and Wohlleben defenses claiming bias on the part of the judges. Several of the witnesses were police officers.

The crime scene investigator reported on his work, which seems to have been quite thorough. His conclusion: “They did not come in order to rob or anything, they only came to kill”

Several of his colleagues reported on the investigation, painting a picture similar to that known from several of the other murders: On the one hand, the police knew early on that the same Ceska pistol as in other murders had been used and thus that this crime was part of the murder series. Nonetheless, for a long time, the investigation was focused solely on alleged suspicion against the Turgut family and the family of the owner of the kebap shop where Turgut was killed. The lead investigator claimed that there had been no concrete leads concerning a xenophobic motive – in a police press release shortly after the murder, the police claimed to be able exclude this option at the moment.

The owner of the kebap shop, who found Mehmet Turgut in his last minutes very shortly after the murder, described in very concrete terms how the Turgut family, as well as he himself, had suffered after the killing. He had given up his shop and never set foot there again. He also described how he was interrogated for hours by the police, told time and time again that “he knew everything” about the motives, and generally treated like a suspect.

The court dismissed the motion brought by victim’s counsel Seda Basay that the case file of the investigation against Andreas Temme, officer of the domestic secret service, be incorporated into the case. The court claimed that these files were not relevant to the judgment to be passed in this case. This decision was widely hailed as unacceptable by victims’ counsel given that the importance of Temme as a witness in this case is evident. Seda Basay announced a statement for tomorrow.