A “spoilt” rich kid is facing life in prison after investigators rejected the hypothesis that his beautiful 17-year-old girlfriend had committed suicide when she fell to her death from a fourth floor and charged him with murder.

Police had originally accepted that pretty Duygu Delen had committed suicide after she was found at the bottom of a block of flats in the city of Gaziantep in the south-central Turkish province of the same name on 15th August 2020.

But they reclassified the case as a murder after an autopsy found that she was already unconscious when she hit the ground. This also appears to be supported by CCTV images, which show the victim hitting the ground and narrowly missing a young boy who had just walked away pushing his bicycle.

At a previous hearing, the defendant had told the court: “You can call me spoilt, a rich snob, or even cocky if you want, but you cannot accuse me of being the killer of the person I loved.”

But the autopsy conducted by Dr Hakan Kar told a different story, and the defendant, who has been named as Mehmet Kaplan and who was 18 years old at the time, has been charged with ‘deliberate murder of a minor’, with prosecutors demanding an aggravated life sentence against the defendant.

The report determined that bruising on Duygu’s body indicated she had been hit with a hard object before her death.

The autopsy also found unusual bruises on her upper right arm, on the outer side of her right elbow, and all over her lower left leg.

It was stated that these marks could have been made with a belt found at the scene or a hard object like a stick, and that they was not something typical of the fall she later suffered.

This is the ninth hearing in the case regarding the death of the teenager, who was just 17 at the time. The prosecutor has asked that the charge of sexual abuse be dropped but asked that the defendant be also charged with looting the home of the victim and insulting her.

The public prosecutor also alleged that Kaplan was a drug user, had anger management problems, and had assaulted the victim in the past out of jealousy by choking her and beating her.

Kaplan has repeatedly protested at being kept in prison for so long pending trial and he reportedly told the court: “People can’t even stand 15 days of isolation due to COVID-19, but I’m between four walls in prison for 15 months.”

First responders who arrived on the scene at the time of the incident could not find a pulse, but 39 heartbeats per minute were observed when connected to a monitor, indicating that Duygu was not conscious but was alive and in shock when she fell. It also indicated that she had major internal bleeding.

Investigators found blood in several rooms in the house, which Kaplan said was his from punching a window during a row with the teenager.

Friends had reported that Kaplan had previously behaved violently and sent threatening messages to the teenager. A message sent to Duygu’s mother during the examination of Kaplan’s mobile phone was also included in the indictment. In the message, he wrote: “Keep Duygu away from me. I cannot control myself.”

He was also found to have had alcohol and cannabis in his blood at the time, as well as antidepressants.

The trial is ongoing.

A life sentence in Turkey is 24 years in prison, whereas an aggravated life sentence is what was introduced to replace the death penalty. Prisoners sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment can only be paroled after serving at least 30 years, or 36 years if given more than one sentence.

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 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’, an online monument established to keep alive the memory of the women who died from gender violence in Turkey that is updated daily, 59 femicides have taken place since the beginning of 2022.