NEWS CENTER - The fate of Ozgür Gündem newspaper reporter Nazım Babaoğlu, who was disappeared in Girê Sor district where he went to follow the news, has not been revealed for 30 years.

 

30 years have passed since Ozgür Gündem newspaper Riha (Urfa) reporter Nazım Babaoğlu was made missing. Babaoğlu never returned from Riha's Girê Sor (Siverek) district, where he went for news on March 12, 1994. Although there are suspicions that the Bucak tribe and JITEM, which committed many unsolved murders in the 1990s, murdered Babaoğlu, no effective investigation was carried out. Despite all the witnesses in the intervening years, the case was left inconclusive. After Nazım was made missing, Aziz Taşkaya, the brother of businessman Hüseyin Taşkaya, who was kidnapped in Siverek in 1993, said that he saw Nazım at Sedat Bucak's house. However, Taşkaya was not heard as a witness.

 

FORMER JITEMIST CONFESSED

 

Although it was stated that on the day Nazım Babaoğlu was kidnapped, newspaper distributor Murat Yürüklu called the Riha office of the Ozgür Gündem newspaper and "requested that a reporter be sent to Siverek", Çoklu later denied these allegations. Çoklu, who later moved to Istanbul, said to Mustafa Avcı, the Provincial Chairman of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) at the time, "I can explain all of this, but I have no security of life. If they accept me as a secret witness, I will tell it all." Despite this, Çoklu was not listened to.

  

Aydın Sevinç, who worked for Gendarmerie Intelligence and anti-terror unit (JITEM) in Riha in 1993, confessed in the fax he sent to the Riha Bar Association in Erzurum Prison in 2011 that Nazım Babaoğlu was kidnapped, killed and buried in 1994. Officials of the Human Rights Association (IHD) Diyarbakır Branch took action and went to Erzurum to meet with Sevinç, but the meeting did not take place.

 

Nazım's older brother, Cemal Babaolu, said in an interview that 2 years after his brother was lost, he saw on television and identified the person who threatened his father at the Anti-terror Unit (TEM) Branch. Stating that he learned that the person his father saw on television was Abdullah Çatlı, Babaoğlu said: "Abdullah Çatlı is someone who was wanted with a red notice and received the death penalty 7 times in the Bahçelievler Massacre, but here he could freely enter the TEM Branch and continue its activities in Kurdistan."

 

LEFT INCONCLUSION

 

Despite all the witnesses and confessions, no effective investigation is carried out in the file regarding Nazım Babaoğlu. Like many "unsolved" murders in Kurdistan in the 1990s, the investigation file regarding Nazım Babaoğlu was left inconclusive due to the statute of limitations in 2014.

 

COURT DECISION: HE IS ALIVE!

 

There was no result in the application made to the Constitutional Court (AYM). The Constitutional Court ruled that there was no violation of Babaoğlu's right to life, claiming that he was alive during the population registration review.