No progress in the case of the killing of top Kurdish lawyer

DIYARBAKIR (K24) - The Diyarbakir Bar Association claimed on Monday that the public prosecutor in Diyarbakir "was not being cooperative" and that progress in the case of the killing of the former head of the association, Tahir Elci was stalled.

In a press conference at the Diyarbakir Bar Association, Deputy Head of the Bar Association, Ahmet Ozmen told reporters that the Chief Public Prosecutor, Ramazan Solmaz, who is investigating last month's killing of the top human rights lawyer was not "listening to witnesses."

Ozmen went on to say that the bar association itself formed a committee made up of twenty lawyers in order to investigate the killing of Tahir Elci in a street shootout between Turkish police officers in plainclothes and suspected members of the PKK-linked Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H).

The Ozmen told K24 that Solmaz interrogated the police officers who were involved in the shootout as witnesses and not as potential suspects. Ozmen revealed that one of the officers who had earlier denied having been at the scene of the incident at the time of the killing admitted to having been there only after the bar called for his identification as he could be seen in a video of the shootout. "But, he was [considered] as a witness [by the prosecutor], again," Ozmen added.

The November 28 killing of the renowned Kurdish lawyer Tahir Elci in Diyarbakir was called an assassination by the bar association he headed as well as the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). Elci's death led to condemnation by top Kurdish and European officials.

(Siddiq Eren contributed to this report from Diyarbakir)