Public order police officer Nazmi Arı, 26, died in Taksim

Click to read the article in Turkish

Nazmi Arı was born in 1951, in Sandıklı, Afyon.
He worked as a public order policeman.
Registration number: 48930.
Nazmi Arı lost his life in Taksim Square on 1 May 1977 while serving in the Istanbul Police Headquarters' Directorate of Public Order Police, however, his name wasn't on the list of police officers on duty in Taksim that day.

He was married and had one child.

Autopsy report

According to the autopsy report, the cause of his death was gunshot injury, with internal bleeding from a punctured lung and aorta as a result of the bullet wound.

The mukhtar

In order to reach the family of Nazmi Arı, I spoke with the mukhtar, or local governing official, of Arı's hometown, Ekinhisar village, in the district of Sandıklı. Through him I was able to reach Nazmi Arı's older brother Fahrettin Arı.

I spoke with Fahrettin Arı through his wife, conveyed my questions to him, and then communicated his answers to me.

Fahrettin Arı spoke about his brother, Nazmi Arı, about how his name was removed from the village school that was originally named after him, and how those responsible for his death have yet to be brought to justice.

Fahrettin Arı, older brother, tells

Nazmi died in 1977. They shot him. We still don't know who did it.

He'd gone to Istanbul for work.

Nazmi was a poor, harmless soul.

He was married, had one child. His wife and children went to Germany after he died. He's buried here, in the village of Ekinhisar. On his gravestone it says, "Martyr who fell in the line of duty on 1 May 1977."

Nazmi was a great brother. There was no other like him. He was such an honest, innocent kid. We were never able to wrap our heads around it, what happened, how it happened. We had a school built in Ekinhisar in his name. A primary school.

The provincial governor at the time asked us what we wanted, what our village lacked. And we told him we didn't have a school. He built a school, and on the sign he had written, "Nazmi Arı Primary School".

In 1991 they changed the name of the school. A kid from Europe came and had the school rebuilt, and so they named it after him. That really upset us. We thought Nazmi's name would always be there, on that sign...

Çetin Yetkin, prosecutor, tells

Çetin Yetkin, the prosecutor for the first hearing of the case regarding 1 May 1977 held in the High Criminal Court in Istanbul, described riot policeman Nazmi Arı in an article published on 3 May 2010 in the newspaper Yeniçağ:

"One of those who died during these events was Nazmi Arı, who worked for what at the time was known as the Public Order Police. Arı was shot as he and a group of his colleagues ran for cover towards the hotel after fire was opened from the hotel and from the top of the Water Administration Building. The bullet entered from the side of his head and, according to the investigation, was shot from close range.

"Nevertheless, the Public Prosecutors responsible for the investigation clearly felt no need to look any further into Arı's death. However, if they had only identified which other police officers were next to him on the side from which the bullet was shot while he and his colleagues were running for cover, something that would have been very easy to ascertain at the time, and if those individuals' weapons had been inspected, then it most likely would have been found that when these fleeing, panicked officers themselves returned fire in the direction from which gunfire had been opened upon them, one of them, without realizing it, accidentally shot his colleague.

"To think otherwise would mean accepting that there was someone amongst those police officers who was not an officer and who purposefully shot Nazmi Arı from close range, killing him!"

(TY/APA/SD)

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