His family and friends have not received any news from Fahri Mert (44), a Turkish citizen abducted in İzmir province two weeks ago, according to a report by online news outlet TR724 on Sunday.
According to the report, with Mert’s disappearance, one more person has been added to the list of people who were kidnapped in Ankara and İzmir provinces in black Transporter vans.
A group of people who reportedly introduced themselves as police officers kidnapped Mert after they said, “We will take you to the security directorate,” following his detention at home.
His family and friends have been unable to get any information about Mert’s whereabouts despite the fact that two weeks have passed since the incident. Recalling previous incidents of abductions, they are waiting for an answer from the authorities.
Orçun Şenyücel, a former public employee who was dismissed from his job at the Competition Authority in 2016, had also been abducted by an unknown group of people on April 2018, according to his parents.
“My son Orçun ŞENYÜCEL who was dismissed under a post-coup government decree in 2016, was abducted after being forced into a black Transporter [van] in Ankara’s Turkkonut district at 00.04 on April 21, 2018,” a Twitter account believed to be that of his parent said.
“My son was only a dismissed public employee. He has never been tried or convicted of any charges. I am worried about his life, help me,” said the tweet.
Video footage believed to show Şenyücel’s abduction was shared by the same Twitter account on Monday.
Şenyücel, a father of two, worked as an expert at the Competition Authority until his dismissal over alleged links to the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government accuses of masterminding a failed coup on July 15, 2016. The group denies any involvement.
According to a data compiled by the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), 19 people were abducted in Turkey since the controversial coup attempt on July 15, 2016. Mysterious disappearances involving already-victimized opposition groups have become a common occurrence in Turkey in the aftermath of the coup attempt.
Those not seen for quite some time mostly have in common in their personal histories that they have lost their jobs amid a sweeping crackdown the Turkish government has conducted against its critics, particularly members of the Gülen movement.
More than 150,000 people have lost their jobs, some 150,000 have been detained and about 80,000 of them were have been put in pretrial detention over Gülen ties.
Journalist Cem Küçük, a staunch supporter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, suggested during a live TV program that Turkish intelligence should kill family members of jailed Gülenists in order to turn the inmates into operatives for the Erdoğan regime.
Speaking during the TV show along with his program partner journalist Fuat Uğur, Küçük said Israeli intelligence agency MOSSAD had killed family members of Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian inmates to make them MOSSAD operatives.
