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A jilted killer stabbed, strangled, and set fire to a 15-year-old girl after her mother turned down his marriage proposal.
The sick act of revenge was discovered when residents of Gebze District, Kocaeli Province, north-western Turkey noticed smoke rising from a building on 8th October.
Police, paramedics and firemen were dispatched to the scene.
After putting out the blaze, firemen found schoolgirl Busra Kabatas’s charred body under a quilt in her bedroom.
Police immediately launched an investigation and swiftly identified Taner Yaylaci as the prime suspect.
Investigators believe he was obsessed with Busra’s mother, Aylin Cetin.
He was arrested while trying to flee to Zonguldak two hours after the killing and was remanded in custody.
He reportedly admitted during questioning that he had been waiting on Aylin’s street for two days to observe her movements.
Investigators believe he had actually intended to kill Aylin but had found her daughter at home instead.
He reportedly stabbed Busra – who was getting ready to leave for school – before taking her to her bedroom, where he strangled her and threw a quilt on top of her.
He is then said to have doused the quilt with a flammable liquid he had brought with him and set it on fire.
Devastated Aylin told local media that she had met Yaylaci in 2015 at the factory where she worked before he was fired from his job.
She said: “He said he wanted to marry me, that he loved me. I told him that I couldn’t marry him because of my health problems.”
Aylin told how Yaylaci began to harass her by regularly turning up at her home uninvited.
She said: “My child was killed just because I refused. I want him to be punished in the most severe way.”
Femicide is a growing problem in Turkey, particularly after the country officially quit the Istanbul Convention in July last year.
According to the 2021 Annual Data Report announced by the ‘We Will Stop Femicide Platform’, 280 women were killed by men in 2021, while 217 women were found suspiciously dead.
According to data from the ‘Monument Counter’, which is “a digital memorial for women killed by violence” and is updated daily, 309 femicides have taken place in Turkey so far this year.
(T4 / ends)
