Background
Yusuf Ekinci was a lawyer born in 1942 in Lice, in Diyarbakır province. He studied law at Ankara University, was involved in the Workers' Party of Turkey and in Kurdish cultural activities in the 1960s and 70s, and practised in Diyarbakır in the 1970s. From 1984 he worked as a lawyer in Ankara.
What happened
On 24 February 1994, as Ekinci was driving home from his office in Ankara, a red car stopped him; witnesses said he was forced into it. His body was found the next day, 25 February 1994, near the Doktorlar housing estate in the Gölbaşı district. The recorded cause of death was gunshot wounds. His family and lawyers have pointed to the type of weapon, one common among police units, as grounds for suspecting state-linked involvement.
Treating the killing together with a wider series of 1990s Ankara cases was an approach the family and the press long advocated; the files were eventually joined in a single trial.
Investigation and legal proceedings
For years the investigation made no progress. It returned to public attention through statements by Ayhan Çarkın, a former special-operations police officer convicted in the Susurluk case, who said Ekinci had been taken from in front of his office to Gölbaşı and that officers of the Special Operations Department carried out the killing. His wife and son, both lawyers, filed a criminal complaint on 25 February 2011.
The European Court of Human Rights had already ruled on 16 July 2002, in the family's application, that Turkey violated the procedural limb of the right to life and the right to an effective remedy by failing to investigate adequately.
A case against 19 defendants, including a former interior minister and former special-operations officers, opened in Ankara on 16 April 2014 and covered a series of killings from the 1990s. A first verdict came on 13 December 2019; the acquittals were overturned by the Ankara Regional Court on 5 April 2021. After the retrial, the Ankara 1st Heavy Penal Court ruled on 26 May 2023 that the case regarding Ekinci's killing was barred by the statute of limitations, and the Court of Cassation's 1st Criminal Chamber upheld this on 15 October 2024.
Where it stands today
As a result, no one has been convicted over Ekinci's death. His family and legal organisations argue that statutes of limitations should not apply to such grave violations. Ekinci is remembered each year by the Ankara Bar and by human rights groups.