Officers terrify 2 Kurdish boys with police dogs during raid on their Diyarbakır home

Police officers used their dogs to terrify two Kurdish boys during a raid on their home in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır, the Mesopotamia News Agency (MA) reported.

Faris and Hanım Türk’s house was raided under a warrant issued by the Diyarbakır Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office. Faris Türk was detained and later arrested for alleged membership in a terrorist organization. According to Hanım, their two sons aged seven and 16 were forced to lie down on the floor while police dogs walked over them.

The mother claimed the two boys were sleeping when the police broke down the front door and entered the house. They woke up, and the younger boy started crying because he was afraid of dogs. The police unleashed the dogs on the father and then hit him with the barrel of a gun when he tried to get the dog off himself. He was later taken to another room and beaten.

Hanım claimed they were tortured like this for two hours and that the children were traumatized by the incident. “My younger son wakes up at night screaming for his father. He cannot sleep, and we still have not been able to tell him that his father was arrested.”

This is not the first time the police have unleashed dogs on Kurdish citizens. Ousted co-mayor of Van’s Edremit Municipality Rojbin Çetin was attacked by police dogs and tortured in her home in Diyarbakır during a police raid on June 26.

Deputy chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) parliamentary group Meral Danış Beştaş claimed Çetin was alone in her home during the raid and that the torture went on for three-and-a-half hours.

“Two police dogs were set on Çetin before the police officers entered the house. The dogs bit both her legs and broke the skin … According to the medical report, there is the mark of a boot on her waist, her lip is split and there are injuries on many parts of her arms and body.”

There were similar allegations about the Diyarbakır police following a house raid on May 31, part of an operation to find the suspected killer of a police officer. The two victims accused the police of letting their dogs attack them during the raid.

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from SCF