Operation against 12 suspects in 14-year-old Bursa murder case, 11 detained

Acting on the instructions of the Bursa Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, teams from the Bursa Homicide Bureau carried out an operation targeting 12 suspects in the file concerning the killing of truck driver Mehmet Şahinoğlu, who disappeared in 2012; a total of 11 people were detained, including the file's main suspect, Mehmet Salih A., along with his wife and children. Work is continuing to catch one suspect who remains at large.

The operation was carried out under the coordination of the Department of Investigation of Unsolved Crimes within the Ministry of Justice. In his statement on efforts to solve unsolved murders, Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced that 83 murders had been solved across 76 files. The case had previously been brought to public attention by Habertürk reporter Mustafa Şekeroğlu's report headlined 'No bodies, but the teeth spoke'.

The teams re-evaluated forensic reports, dental records, communications data and witness statements concerning burned human bones found in Bursa's Kestel district in 2015. The fact that an upper jaw bone fragment found years earlier proved consistent with dental records played an important role in the Court of Cassation overturning the acquittal rulings.

The case began with a missing person report filed in Istanbul in 2012. Truck driver Mehmet Şahinoğlu, from Osmaniye, disappeared after arriving in Istanbul on 18 October 2012; his relatives filed a missing person report on 21 December 2012. The file caught the attention of Police Superintendent Oktay Kapsız, known by the nickname 'Kurt', who was assigned to the Istanbul Missing Persons Bureau in 2014, and it emerged that Şahinoğlu's recently divorced wife, Saime Sivri, was also missing.

According to allegations in the investigation file, Mehmet Salih A. held Şahinoğlu responsible for Saime Sivri leaving him. To bring Şahinoğlu to Istanbul, İsmail Yazal's friend Sultan D. was brought in; Şahinoğlu, who spoke by phone for days with Sultan D., who introduced herself as a wealthy widow, came to Istanbul on 18 October 2012 to meet her and was never heard from again.

HTS and cell tower records showed that on the day he arrived in Istanbul, Şahinoğlu was in the same area as some of the suspects. Police established that the suspects went to Bursa's Gemlik district and that Mehmet Salih A. owned a villa in Gemlik Kurşunlu. In 2015, simultaneous operations were carried out in Diyarbakır, Bingöl, Bursa, Istanbul and Muş, and 5 suspects, including Mehmet Salih A., were caught. An examination at the Forensic Medicine Institute determined that a skull found during excavations at the villa did not belong to the missing Mehmet Şahinoğlu or Saime Sivri.

Mehmet Salih A., Gürsel S., Sultan D. and Saadet A. were arrested on 16 May 2015; in the case opened at the Bursa 3rd High Criminal Court, Saadet A. was released about a month later, and the other three defendants were released on 15 February 2016. The course of the file changed with the statement given by Mehmet Salih A.'s nephew, Ercan Akdeniz, who went to the Eskişehir Odunpazarı Police Station on 12 October 2016. Akdeniz alleged that his uncle, whom he visited in prison, asked him to move a body he said was buried at the villa in Gemlik Kurşunlu to another location.