Background
Behçet Cantürk was a businessman from Lice, Diyarbakır, who worked in Istanbul. Most sources describe him as a businessman of Kurdish origin and as one of the partners of the newspaper Özgür Gündem. Some foreign sources mention smuggling allegations, which are not reported as established by a court.
He had earlier been held in custody for a period, and several investigations had been conducted about him. A police search of his office on Bağdat Caddesi about a week before he was abducted is also reported.
What happened
On the evening of 14 January 1994, Cantürk phoned his wife to say he would be home early, then got into a car with his driver and could not be reached again. Sources mention a meeting in front of the Fenerbahçe Officers' Club in Istanbul. The bodies of Cantürk and his driver were found the next day in the Kırkpınar area of Sapanca, in Sakarya province.
The driver's surname is spelled differently across publications, so we do not give a single form. Sources describe a single gunshot to the head as the cause of death.
Investigation and legal process
The Sapanca prosecutor's office handled the investigation, and the file made little progress for years. The Susurluk Report, at the end of the 1990s, included assessments that Cantürk was killed through a decision of state-linked structures; this is not a court ruling, and no one has been convicted of the killing.
Cantürk's lawyer, Medet Serhat, was shot dead in Istanbul in November 1994. Years later, after statements by a former special operations police officer, Ayhan Çarkın, site inspections were carried out along the Bolu–Adapazarı–Sapanca route. Claims made in 2021 in videos by a crime-group leader brought the file back into the news.
Where it stands today
More than thirty years have passed, and those responsible have not been identified in court. The Cantürk file is cited as one of the unresolved killings of the 1990s. Families and human rights organisations continue to press for statutes of limitation not to be applied in such cases.