Background
Savaş Buldan, Hacı Karay and Adnan Yıldırım were three businessmen of Kurdish origin working in Turkey in the early 1990s. It was a period of intense armed conflict in the southeast, and many businessmen were killed in murders that remained officially unsolved.
Buldan's wife, Pervin Buldan, later entered politics and became one of the most visible followers of the case.
What happened
In the early hours of 3 June 1994, the three men were leaving a hotel casino in Istanbul when armed people with radios who identified themselves as police put them into cars and drove away. When families asked, officials said no one had been taken into custody.
That evening, a man fishing by the Melen river in Yığılca, Bolu province, told the gendarmerie he had seen three bodies. They were later buried in the Avcılar cemetery in Istanbul. Some sources give 4 June as the date they were found.
Hanefi Avcı, then head of the intelligence branch of Istanbul police, described the killings in a 1997 statement as the work of an illegal group. The European Court's Yıldırım judgment also refers to findings in the Susurluk Report on such killings.
Investigation and legal process
The domestic investigation produced no result. After the 1996 Susurluk crash, the Susurluk Report and parliamentary inquiries raised allegations about state-linked networks behind such killings.
In Buldan v. Turkey (2004) the European Court of Human Rights found a violation of the right to life, in the form of a failure to investigate effectively; Adnan Yıldırım's family's application ended in a separate judgment. The Court awarded compensation. In 2021 a crime-group leader made allegations linking a former senior police official to these events; the claims were referred to the judiciary, but there is no final conviction.
The renewed allegations were added to an indictment handled in the Ankara JİTEM case.
Where it stands today
The Saturday Mothers continue to commemorate all three men and call for justice. In 2026 Pervin Buldan reportedly applied for the case to be re-examined. No court has established the identities of those who carried out the killings.