GÜLEÇ JUDGMENT OF 27 JULY 1998 24 Mr Süsin had not seen how Ahmet Güleç had been killed. With others, he had signed a complaint filed with the İdil public prosecutor’s office against Mustafa Karatan. A gendarmerie officer, Major Osman, had taken his statement in the course of an investigation into the incidents. But the investigation had come to nothing. Mr Süsin had been arrested, in relation to another matter, in January 1993. In 1994 he had left Turkey while proceedings against him were pending. He had eventually been sentenced to twelve years and six months’ imprisonment under Article 168 § 2 of the Criminal Code for membership of an armed group, namely the PKK. After examining the photograph of the armoured vehicle on the case file, Mr Süsin stated that it was a Panzer and that the Condor was smaller. In fact, a Condor was a jeep equipped with a machine gun. The Condor had fired for four or five minutes. (n) Hüseyin Demir (chairman of the İdil branch of the People’s Social Democratic Party (SHP) at the material time) 43. Mr Demir stated that he had been at home when the demonstration started. His house was one kilometre from the centre of town. From his balcony, he had been able to see the route taken by the demonstrators (mainly Atatürk Street) and the armoured vehicles belonging to the security forces following them. The demonstration had been called to protest against what gendarmes had done to certain inhabitants of a village in Mardin Province. The demonstrators were not armed. At about 9 a.m. he had heard shots. From his balcony, he could see the armoured vehicles firing in all directions. Later he had gone to the health centre where there were a number of wounded people and Ahmet Güleç’s body. He had helped to take the wounded to various hospitals in the region. The soldiers inside the armoured vehicle were not necessarily shooting to kill but might have been trying to disperse the demonstrators. However, they had fired without concern for the risk to the demonstrators’ lives. Most of the wounded had not gone to hospital for fear of being prosecuted for demonstrating illegally. Mr Demir had not seen any gendarmes injured in the course of the incidents. While Mr Demir was at the health centre in the social security hospital he had been arrested by gendarmes and held in police custody for three days before being brought before one of the public prosecutors at the Diyarbakır National Security Court. Two members of his family had later been charged but then acquitted. The gendarmes had seized weapons and cartridges from citizens and fabricated evidence. However, this ploy had not fooled anyone for long.