Kurdish politician Gültan Kışanak, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 2016, attended the funeral of her late sister Zeynep Özer in Elazığ. She was brought to the city by plane from Kandıra High Security Prison, accompanied by guards. The funeral service took place in the Alevi community centre in the Fevzi Çakmak district. Numerous politicians from the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), Green Left Party and DBP (Democratic Regions Party) as well as activists from the Free Women's Movement (TJA) came to Elazığ to condole with Gültan Kışanak. Zeynep Özer was laid to rest in the village of Sün. Gültan Kışanak tied a cloth to her sister's gravestone and also visited her parents' graves. After the funeral, she was taken back to prison in Kandıra.

Gültan Kışanak was first arrested at the age of 19 after the military coup of 12 September 1980 and tortured in the dungeon of Amed (Diyarbakir). Among other things, she was held in a two-square-metre dog kennel for six months. After two years of resistance in prison, she studied journalism and worked for Kurdish newspapers, including as editor-in-chief of Özgür Gündem in Istanbul. Later, she went into politics and was a member of the Turkish parliament. In 2014, she was the first woman to be elected mayor in Amed. As mayor of the Kurdish metropolis, she had the prison where she was once tortured converted into a museum. In the course of the mass arrests of HDP politicians in autumn 2016, she was imprisoned and sentenced to a long prison term. She is also one of the defendants in the ongoing Kobanê trial. In prison, she wrote a book and continues to speak out publicly on current issues. Gültan Kışanak is one of the best-known Kurdish politicians and has been in prison as a political hostage of the Turkish regime for almost seven years.