Background
Lazım Esmaili and Askar Simitko were two Kurdish men from the Urmia region of Iran who lived in Turkey. Their names are spelled differently in the press and in official papers; the most common spelling of Esmaili's first name is Lazım. In news reports and the Susurluk report the two are described as people with business activities in Turkey who were alleged to have links to intelligence circles; some of these claims rest on official reports and some on statements by officials of the time.
The killing took place about twenty-two months before the 1996 Susurluk crash and, because of documents that later came to light, is regarded as one of the pieces of the large file in which relations between state, politics and organised crime were debated.
What happened
According to accounts based on the intelligence (MİT) report, the two men went on the evening of 14 January 1995 to the casino of a hotel in Ataköy, Istanbul, and left around 03:45 in the early hours of 15 January. On the road they were stopped by people wearing police vests and carrying radios; a fake police checkpoint is said to have been set up.
The bodies were found by villagers in Kerevir Creek in Silivri, Istanbul, on 28 January 1995. Both men had been killed by gunfire. Going beyond that is not the purpose of this text.
Investigation and legal process
The course of the investigation changed over the years. A later indictment alleged that Mahmut Yıldırım, code-named "Yeşil", was responsible for abducting and killing the men. According to the indictment, the suspects took a large amount of money from Esmaili's brother and relatives also paid money into a bank account; the two men were killed regardless. These are allegations in an indictment and should be treated as accusations unless a final judgment says otherwise.
Intelligence official Mehmet Eymür argued that the Susurluk scandal grew out of the chain of events that began with this killing. In his account the two men worked for MİT inside Iranian intelligence and were killed over drug smuggling. This account is assessed differently across official and unofficial sources.
Where it stands today
There is no final judgment that satisfactorily explains who carried out the killing and why. The file is cited as part of the Susurluk investigation and as one example of unanswered questions about relations between state bodies.
Whatever has been alleged about them, the deaths of the two men remain on record as a killing that should be clarified.
The method of the killing, setting up a fake police checkpoint, suggests that it was carried out in a planned way. Developments after the deaths and information in the MİT report came to the fore after the 1996 Susurluk crash, and this killing was re-read as one of the first links in that chain. The families' expectations of the judicial process were largely unmet.