On February 20, the Kurdistani man Ugur Sakar set himself on fire in front of the courthouse in Krefeld, Germany to protest the aggravated isolation imposed upon Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Immediately after the protest by Sakar, who is still receiving treatment in a hospital in Duisburg as he has 67% of his body covered in burns, media outlets in the North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) state started to publish manipulative stories.

Articles that look like they were written by the same person continue to drop one after the other about Sakar, who turned out to have participated in the long march from Mannheim last week to show solidarity with the hunger strikes and was attacked by the police several times.

Sakar had clearly stated his purpose in setting himself on fire in the letter he left behind: “to protest the isolation imposed upon Kurdish People’s Leader Abdullah Ocalan and to condemn the German state’s police brutality against the Kurds”. None of the articles in the German media even mention the letter, but all claimed that Sakar was “a criminal who had been on the police’s radar before”.

FALSE INFORMATION DISSIPATED IN PUBLIC FROM SINGLE SOURCE

The Rheinische Post newspaper stood out with the disinformation they have published since the other day, in an attempt to distort Sakar’s protest. In the most recent article yesterday, the newspaper claimed that 43 year old Sakar could “possibly be mentally ill”. The same claims were published in local papers in the NRW as well.

The article also brought to the fore the police raid against Sakar’s home yesterday and the police’s statement. The same papers called Sakar “a person known to the police” because he had been investigated on his participation to a demonstration in Dusseldorf in January without a permit.