Erdoğan pardons man convicted of taking part in burning 35 people alive

Duvar English

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pardoned a man convicted of taking part in a massacre in 1993 that resulted in the deaths of 35 people.

Ahmet Turan Kılıç was sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment over the Sivas Massacre, which took place when a mob set the Madımak Hotel in the Central Anatolian province of Sivas on fire on July 2, 1993, killing 33 intellectuals and two hotel personnel.

Erdoğan lifted the 86-year-old man's sentence due to the health problems that he has been suffering within the scope of the 16th subsection of the constitution's 104th article.

Kılıç, who was given death penalty before the abolishment of capital punishment in Turkey in 2002, was released on Jan. 31.

There are dozens of sick prisoners in Turkey.

The attack against the Madımak Hotel targeted a group of artists and scholars participating in a conference organized by the Pir Sultan Abdal Culture Foundation (PSAKD), an Alevi organization. The event came at a time when writer Aziz Nesin, who was among the guests, had become a public target for translating Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” into Turkish.

The participants of the conference were accused of being infidels by the large crowd outside, who had been provoked to action by a number of local political leaders.

In addition to the 35 people who died in the massacre, two protestors, who were in the crowd outside the hotel that instigated the events leading to the fire and who watched the hotel while people inside were burning to death and calling for help, also died in the fire.

The building, which became a symbol of discrimination faced by Turkey’s Alevi population, was expropriated in 2010 and turned into a science museum. The families of many of those who died in 1993 have demanded for it to be turned into a “museum of shame.”

Among those killed in the Madımak Hotel arson attack were poets Metin Altıok, Behçet Aysan and Uğur Kaynar, writer Asım Bezirci and Dutch anthropologist Carina Cuanna, as well as popular Alevi musicians Muhlis Akarsu and Nesimi Çimen.

Nesin was rescued by firefighters, but was beaten by them as he was rescued from the burning hotel.