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Nuri Gökhan Bozkır, a former Special Operations Command officer and one of the suspects of the 2002 assassination of Prof. Necip Hablemitoğlu, a historian and a public intellectual, has been taken into custody.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last night (January 26) announced during a live interview that Bozkır had been brought to Turkey from Ukraine.
"The MİT [National Intelligence Agency] had been tracking Nuri Gökhan Bozkır, who is one of the suspects of this assassination, for a long time," he said. "Our intelligence organization found that this person was hiding in Ukraine and we talked to Zelensky and the previous presidents about catching and bringing this person to our country."
Bozkır had ties to the "Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ)," an Islamic group held responsible for the 2016 coup attempt, and was known to be supplying weapons and ammunition to ISIS, said the president.
Ersan Barkın, the attorney of Hablemitoğlu family, said they hope the detention of Bozkır would contribute to the solving of the murder.
The assassination
Hablemitoğlu was shot dead in front of his home on December 18, 2002. At the time, he was working on a book about the Fetullah Gülen group's efforts to infiltrate state institutions. The book was released unfinished a year after his death.
No lawsuit has yet been filed concerning the assassination.
Hablemitoğlu was a historian and a lecturer at Ankara University.
Bozkır had arrest warrants against him for "being a member of an armed terrorist organization," "being a member of a criminal organization," and "premeditated killing."
He fled abroad in 2015, after the investigation into the "MİT trucks," onion trucks loaded with ammunition that were found by gendarmerie officers in Urfa while heading to Syria.
Ukraine had rejected Bozkır's asylum applications. (AS/VK)
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