Background
Hafız Akdemir was born in 1964 in Diyarbakır. In October 1991 he began working at the weekly Yeni Ülke and then became Özgür Gündem’s Diyarbakır reporter. He covered hunger strikes, workers’ protests and village evacuations, and also wrote under the pen name ‘Rojin Pale’.
What happened
Özgür Gündem began publishing on 30 May 1992. About a week later, on 8 June 1992, Akdemir was shot dead on a street near Melik Ahmet Caddesi in Diyarbakır’s Sur district as he walked from home to the paper’s office with his nephew. He was 27 and is remembered as the newspaper’s first loss.
His body was buried in Mardinkapı Cemetery without the family’s consent.
Investigation and where it stands
According to press reports, the killing was attributed to Hizbullah and was among the murders tried in the Hizbullah case. A suspect was caught some 15 years after the event but was released in 2019 pending a retrial request; the file has not been conclusively resolved.
The street where he was killed bears his name, and a commemoration is held there every 8 June.