Alleged war criminal who 'could not be found' shares pictures from MHP office

MHP leader Bahçeli (m) and Çelik behind him.

In April 2021, Alparslan Çelik threatened former Commander of the Naval Academy and public figure Türker Ertürk, on his social media account, stating that "we will shoot him in the head."

Ertürk was one of 103 signatories to an April 2021 declaration on the Montreux Convention following President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's comments that the treaty was unsuccessful in defending Türkiye's rights. The retired admiral filed a criminal complaint against Çelik for his posts.

According to columnist Barış Terkoğlu in a recent piece in newspaper Cumhuriyet, İstanbul's chief public prosecutor essentially protected Çelik from effective prosecution, as the prosecutor could not "find" Çelik and marked the case as "unsolved".

However, Ertürk and his legal team continued their endeavors to trial Çelik. On October 4 they sent pictures to the prosecutor with MHP chair Devlet Bahçeli and Çelik in a meeting in the eastern city of Erzurum, shared on Çelik's social media account. Nonetheless, the prosecutor responded similarly last week, asserting that "Alparslan Çelik cannot be found."

Thereupon, Ertürk's lawyer wrote chief Prosecutor İsmail Uçar, explaining that the suspect continues sharing Twitter posts and actively writes about the recent assassination of ex-Grey Wolves leader Sinan Ateş.

Alleged war criminal

Çelik, who is the son of an ex-mayor from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), gained notoriety after allegedly killing Oleg Peshkov.

Peshkov piloted a Russian fighter plane downed by Turkish forces after supposedly entering Türkiye's airspace on November 24 2015. While the pilot initially survived using his parachute, he was shot by a militant group led by Çelik during his descent. A war crime according to the Geneva Convention.

Çelik was never convicted of the killing and justified his actions in a video, stating the pilot dropped bombs on Turkmens. According to Terkoğlu, Türkiye's prosecutor's office defended the decision of non-prosecution as the pilot "may have suffered skull fractures due to hitting his head on the glass section above him while leaving the plane".

In 2016 Çelik was detained and later charged with 'bearing arms' when he and 13 people were arrested while carrying weapons at a restaurant in İzmir. The police later confiscated machine guns, pistols, and radio equipment at the suspects' homes, resulting to Çelik serving five years in Prison.

Two prominent ex-MHP members died last month

The AKP coalition partner has been riddled with controversy, as of late. On January 5, Gizem Memioğlu, former head of the MHP women's branch in the Taşköprü was found dead in her home. Her death came a week after the high-profile killing on broad daylight in Ankara of Sinan Ateş. On the orders of the Bahceli, Ateş in 2019, became chair of the Grey Wolves movement, an ultranationalist group affiliated with the MHP. Ateş would later resign in 2020 over apparent differences of opinion."

It took Bahçeli over a week to respond to the assassination. On January 10, he finally broke his silence, mentioning the killing but not the name of Ateş. The chairman linked the murder to FETÖ, a group alleged to have carried out 2016's failed putsch.

"Turning the murder into a show, thousands of FETÖ accounts were opened to attack the People's Alliance. There have been scores of attacks on social media originating from Pennsylvania. Those hostile to MHP turned it into an issue for political revenge," he said.

With most of the arrested suspects of Ateş's murder turning out to be drug addicts, Bahçeli condemned those who tried to connect the MHP to drug gangs.

"Whoever is trying to link MHP together with drug gangs, with paid gunmen, with murder gangs is dishonorable," Bahçeli remarked (WM).