Ayetullah AY was born in 1980 in a village called Yayık in Kulp district of Diyarbakır. He obtained his high school diploma in Diyarbakır and prepared for the university examinations in 1998-1999, but could not be admitted to any faculty. During these years, the economic and political instability in Turkey and especially in our region made him lose hope of getting into university, so he decided to go abroad. Although he tried to obtain a right of residence by working in different jobs abroad for a few years, the process of obtaining a residence permit became an uncertain process. Considering the positive economic and political developments that emerged in our country and region in the early 2000s, the period when Turkey’s membership process to the European Union began, he decided to return to Turkey. As there was no possibility of deferment abroad, he became on deferment and therefore had to enter the country illegally in 2004. He started living in Istanbul by issuing a fake identity card in his cousin’s name. With financial support from his family, he found a job in a company selling diet and nutritional products called Herbalife as a distributor and started working.

On 29 October 2004, while distributing flyers to advertise the company he works for, he was arrested by the anti-terror police of the Istanbul Security Directorate with a false identity card issued on his cousin’s name as part of an operation against the PKK. During his detention in Istanbul, he was forcibly interrogated without his lawyer. Again, in the absence of his lawyer’s and the prosecution’s consent, his house was searched twice, and nothing was found in the first search; the report of this first search with his signature had proven this. However, after the proceedings were concluded, his home was searched by another team of police officers who had just arrived for the second time, and they claimed that a mobile phone had been found in his home.

However, since he did not accept and sign the second search report, it later emerged during the investigation that the “phone” allegedly found during this search did not have any fingerprints o him. This planted of evidence began a series of events that can be described as a conspiracy and which have darkened his life from then to the present day.

Prior to the day of his arrest, various incidents occurred in his hometown Diyarbakir, the perpetrators of which could not be identified, and the fact that his birthplace was Diyarbakir, even though his identity was falsified, it was sufficient to arrest him without any justification and to accuse him to be the perpetrators of those incidents, by illegally planting evidences.

Such that his father, Abdullah Ay, who was the head of the village of Yayık in Kulp district, was killed by Hizbullah in Silvan district in 1992. Due to this murder and the threats and pressure put on the family at that time, they had moved to Diyarbakır, but they continue to face persecution by the police.

During the trial, in the first indictment against him, he was accused of being involved in three events that took place between June and September 2004. The first was the murder of two policemen at a police checkpoint; the second was an armed attack on a commando battalion in Hani; the third, forcibly confiscating mobile phone (the phone allegedly found in his house in Istanbul, which he denied) and the identity card of a farmer named M. Ç.

At the hearing in April 2007, the local court acquitted the Ayetullah for the lack of evidence in the case file on the murder of two policemen and the attack on a commando battalion in Hani, but he was convicted of two incidents in which M.Ç.’s phone and identity card were stolen, as well as another mobile phone and a SIM card used in an attempt to attack the Victory Parade.

Although there were no fingerprints found on the phone, which was allegedly found in his home, all his objections to the phone allegedly being found during the second visit to his home, when he or his lawyer were not present, were rejected by the court throughout the trial.

Ayetullah Ay’s objections to the court that the police might have planted the phone after entering the house for the second time were disregarded and the court relied only on the police reports without even considering whether this evidence, which led to the conviction , was fabricated. Not only that a piece of paper was allegedly caught during the body search in prison during his detention, and based on this piece of paper, his house in Istanbul, which had been searched twice before, was searched again (the Ayetullah is in prison at this time) and during this search (of the same house) it was alleged that explosives were found (3rd search) and again he was accused of those materials as well.

Ayetullah denied these allegations outright again, he insisted on his statement that nothing had been found during the body search, and demanded that those who had made the allegation to be heard as witnesses in the court. He requested the examination of those alleged notes by independent institutions to reveal whether they belonged to him or not, and most importantly, he wanted the video recording, which was the only evidence, to be examined, but all these requests for evidence were rejected and he was sentenced to a severe life imprisonment on the basis of the evidence provided by the police. This decision, which was completely unlawful and based on one-sided evidence, was also approved by the 9th Criminal Division of the Supreme Court in February 2008.

After internal remedies were ended, Ayetullah filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights pursuant to Article 6, which is a violation of the right to a fair trial, alleging the unlawful obtaining of evidence and the unlawfulness he faced during his detention and imprisonment, along with the material evidence. After a long judicial process, the ECtHR finally reached a final decision on 8 March 2020, convicting Turkey of violating Article 6 of the Convention and deciding that Ayetullah be re-tried.

The summary of the ECtHR’s decision highlighted the following poin

• Art 6 § 1 (criminal) and Art 6 § 3
• Fair hearing
• Rights of defence
• Adversarial trial
• Criminal proceedings against applicant relating to terrorism, with allegations of planted evidence and other procedural shortcomings
• No assistance of lawyer during police custody or house search
• Inconsistencies in house search findings, conducted in the absence of witnesses and based on vaguely worded warrant
• Contested findings of search of applicant’s person and house during pre-trial detention
• Inconsistencies in evidence relating to mobile phones
• Absence of procedural safeguards as regards crucial pieces of evidence
• Failure of domestic courts to give sufficient reasons for conviction and to properly examine the submissions of the parties
• Inability of the applicant to effectively challenge authenticity, veracity and quality of evidence

The court’s decision became final on 8 March 2021. Subsequently, on 22 March 2021, the Ayatollah’s lawyer lodged a motion for suspension of the execution and retrial pursuant to the ECtHR judgment.

Disregarding the 17-year period of detention in severe isolation, the request for stopping the execution was refused and the first hearing of the retrial was set for a distant date, 16 December 2021.