World Bulletin / News Desk

A man suspected of being the assassin of Kurdish writer Musa Anter in 1992 was detained on Tuesday in Şırnak province.

H.Y., who the prosecutors accuse of being the hitman in the 1992 attack in which journalist Orhan Miroğlu was also injured, was photographed for the first time by the media. The Sabah daily published the picture.

Sabah said the suspect had not changed his official identification card after since the time of the murder. He was taken to Diyarbakır to testify to a special prosecutor.

The statute of limitations would normally expire in three months; however, Sabah claimed that the statute of limitations was automatically extended by another 10 years because H.Y. was finally detained.

Miroğlu, who was shown the photograph of the suspect, said the man strongly resembled the hitman. “I saw [the hitman] for about half an hour. But the face that remains as a dark memory in my mind from that night is close to this. This man is probably the man who shot Musa Anter and me.”

H.Y. had introduced himself as an intermediary regarding the sale of a plot of land owned by the slain writer at a hotel where Miroğlu and Anter had met for dinner. The three men took a taxi to the property together, but Anter got suspicious and stopped the taxi and got out. After the taxi left, H.Y. allegedly took out a gun and started shooting at the two men. Sabah reported that the taxi driver who drove the three men that day and the waiter at the hotel were also going to be summoned to identify the suspect.

Diyarbakır Specially Authorized Court prosecutor Osman Coşkun is conducting the investigation. Sabah said its reporters worked in three teams under difficult conditions for six months, traveling to Dyarbakır, Mersin, Şırnak and Stockholm to locate him.

The identity of the killer had earlier been disclosed by Abdülkadir Aygan, a former Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) member who was later recruited by JİTEM, an illegal unit established unofficially in the 1990s within the gendarmerie that relied on means outside the law to conduct what its officers viewed as counterterrorism efforts, in statements made to the Turkish media and the Diyarbakır Prosecutor's Office. Aygan currently lives in Sweden, where he was granted political asylum after the 1980 coup d'état in Turkey.