The mother of Kurdish student Gülistan Doku, who has been missing in Dersim since January, was temporarily arrested during a sit-in for the resumption of the search for her daughter. Doku's sister was also taken into custody.
A sit-in initiated on Monday in the center of the Dersim city by relatives of student Gülistan Doku, who has been missing since January, has been violently broken up by the police. Doku's mother Bedriye and her sister Aygül were forcibly dragged from the square and temporarily taken into custody. The authorities justified the arrests with a ban on activity issued by the governor's office for the entire province. Ali Çimen, the lawyer for the Doku family, speaks of arbitrary justice.
With the sit-in in front of the Seyit Riza Monument, Bedriye and Aygül Doku demanded the resumption of the search for the 21-year-old student. Gülistan Doku has been missing since January 5. Women's organizations fear a violent crime that is being covered up by the security apparatus. Zainal A., the childhood education student's ex-boyfriend, could be a possible perpetrator. He has since gone into hiding and is apparently protected from prosecution. The man of Russian origin had tried to drag the young woman into his car by force just one day before the disappearance. Doku fought back and passers-by who had observed the incident informed the police.
However, the authorities ruled out Zainal A., whose stepfather is now a suspended police officer in Dersim, as a suspect relatively early on. The police have no leads either, although almost every area of Dersim province is monitored 24 hours a day with surveillance cameras and directional microphones. Instead, it is suspected that the student committed suicide because Doku was captured by a car camera on a reservoir bridge on the day she disappeared. Nevertheless, the young woman's family had to fight for months to have the Uzunçayır dam emptied and searched. In the meantime, an independent evaluation of the video recordings of the vehicle had shown that a possible suicide or fall into the reservoir due to the water movements on that day could be ruled out.
Meanwhile, Bedriye and Aygül Doku are in a hospital. The sister of Gülistan Doku wrote on Twitter that she was kicked in the back by a police officer several times during the crackdown on the sit-in. Her mother fainted during the assault. Çimen has announced that they will file a complaint against the police officers.
