Background
Kemal Kurkut was a 23-year-old music student at İnönü University's Faculty of Fine Arts. On 21 March 2017 he was shot dead at a police checkpoint at the entrance to the Newroz celebrations in Diyarbakır. His death became one of the often-cited examples in Turkish debates on the use of force by security forces and impunity.
It is also remembered as a case in which the official account and visual evidence contradicted each other.
The Newroz celebrations where it happened mark the spring festival for Kurdish communities and are held in mass gatherings in Diyarbakır every year. Kurkut died at the entrance to them. That he carried a knife that day appears both in the official account and in the images; the dispute centres on whether lethal force was necessary in that situation.
What happened
The Diyarbakır Governor's Office's initial statement said Kurkut was a suspect who intended to carry out a suicide attack. However, photographs taken at the moment by journalist Abdurrahman Gök showed a shirtless young man holding a knife and a water bottle, moving away from the checkpoint while a gun was pointed at his back. The images led to the official account being questioned and changed the course of the investigation.
Gök won the 2017 Metin Göktepe Journalism Award for these photographs.
Investigation and trial
Following the investigation, one police officer was tried on a charge of killing with possible intent. The prosecutor, in the final opinion, asked for the charge to be reclassified as causing death by conscious negligence, with a prison term of 3 to 9 years.
In November 2020 the Diyarbakır 7th High Criminal Court acquitted the officer, stating that it could not be established beyond doubt which weapon fired the fatal bullet. One member of the panel dissented. The court also ordered a criminal complaint against 72 other officers at the scene. The officer told the court he did not shoot Kurkut. A regional appeals court later upheld the acquittal, reasoning that Kurkut kept running with a knife despite warning shots and that a shot fired at the ground ricocheted and hit him. This is the court's own assessment and has been rejected by the family and lawyers.
Where it stands today
The case ended without anyone being punished. Bodies such as the Diyarbakır Bar Association described the ruling as an indication of a policy of impunity.
Dark Location remembers Kurkut as a young man studying music and records the differing assessments of the legal outcome.