When Cars Become Weapons: Plainclothes Police Officers Run Over and Kill 17 Year Old Kurdish Boy

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State violence in Turkey knows no boundaries, which has claimed the life of another Kurdish child today.

While a road was blocked during a demonstration in the Kurdish town of Cizre in Şırnak on 23 April, two police officers opened fire at the protesters from their vehicle, wounding 4 people and running over Sinan Saltıkalp.

Seventeen-year-old Sinan Saltıkalp was seriously injured and taken into intensive care after getting hit by the car of the police officers, eye witnesses said.
Saltıkalp lost his life at noon today. He had been in intensive care at a hospital in the Kurdish province of Batman for four months.

The family members went to Batman upon hearing the death and the body of the child was taken to another hospital in the same city for autopsy.

The funeral will be held in Cizre after the autopsy is finalized, agencies reported.

561 Kurdish children have been killed since 1988

561 Kurdish children have been killed by “security forces” since 1988, the Diyarbakır Branch of the Human Rights Association (IHD) reported in 2012. 181 of those children have been killed over the last 10 years during the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The most striking fact of the child killings in Turkey is that the “security forces” are by no means sentenced to prison. Certain cases filed by the Human Rights Association have either been transferred to military courts through prosecutors’ non-jurisdiction decisions or have completely been abated without imposing any penalty on the defendants.