The Kurdish journalist and academic Nagihan Akarsel, who was murdered in an assassination act by the Turkish secret service MIT in Sulaymaniyah last week, was laid to rest in her native city of Konya in central Anatolia. Before the funeral, an autopsy was performed at the state hospital in Konya, after which a convoy escorted the coffin to the village of Gölyazı (ku. Xelîkan) in the Cihanbeyli district, where Akarsel came from.

Along the road that the funeral procession passed into the village, people stood close together and applauded Nagihan Akarsel. Many shouted "Jin, Jiyan, Azadî" (Woman, Life, Freedom) and shouted "Nagihan is immortal". In Gölyazı, women shouldered the coffin of the murdered Jineolojî researcher to the cemetery, among them HDP MPs Nuran İmir, Fatma Kurtulan and Ayşe Acar Başaran.

There was great sympathy from the population, but only very few mourners were allowed into the cemetery. The Turkish military did not only lay a siege around the burial site in the town to prevent the ceremony from turning into a demonstration. Practically, the entire Cihanbeyli district was encircled, the police and army set up blockades on many connecting roads and prevented numerous vehicles from reaching Gölyazı. When Akarsel's coffin was finally taken to her final resting place, soldiers unsuccessfully tried to snatch a banner with the photo of the murdered woman from a group of women.