Story By: Feza Uzay, Sub-Editor: Marija Stojkoska, Agency: Newsflash
A Turkish military officer who allegedly killed his wife in their Tampa apartment in Florida now faces a life sentence in Turkey after being extradited there from the United States.
Major Huseyin Kurtdere, then 39, who allegedly killed his wife Nalan Kurtdere, 38, by tying her to a bed and stuffing socks in her mouth in the Florida apartment, was extradited to Turkey on 29th October 2020, but he denies that he killed her and claims that she was poisoned by drugs that she took.
In his statement to the authorities in Turkey, Huseyin Kurtdere strenuously denied the accusations, saying that his wife was poisoned due to the medication she was taking, and he was released from custody under judicial control and pending trial for murder.
Nalan Kurtdere’s grave was opened up and an autopsy was performed again after the suspect’s claims.
But the report from the Forensic Medicine Institute revealed that the cause of death was “multiple rib fractures due to chest compression and asphyxia (suffocation due to lack of oxygen) caused by inserting socks into the oral cavity”.
After the Forensic Medicine Institute’s report, the prosecutor’s office demanded an aggravated life sentence against the accused and opened a case on charges of deprivation of liberty using threat and force, the deliberate murder of a spouse and torture at the 31st High Criminal Court in the Turkish capital Ankara on Thursday, 3rd March.
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.
But the court rejected the prosecutor’s request for the defendant to be arrested for reasons unknown, meaning that he will remain free until his trial, with the next hearing set for September.
The revelation comes after US prosecutors announced in Tampa in 2020 that they would not charge the defendant over the death of his wife. Turkey has jurisdiction over the case due to the NATO agreement between the two countries.
It is currently unclear what has happened to the couple’s children, who were aged four, seven and the youngest only months at the time. At the time of the hearing in Florida, the children were in the custody of the Florida Department of Children and Families.
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 monument established on the Internet to keep alive the memory of the women who died due to violence against women in Turkey and which is updated every day, 83 femicides have taken place since the beginning of 2022.
