Teenage gunman’s lawyer denies intent to kill

The lawyer of a teenage boy who shot two people in the northern Nicosia suburb of Omorphita said on Friday that his client did not intend to kill his victims and that this was evidenced by the fact he shot them both in the leg.

The boy was appearing in court for the second time, with police officer Emrah Turgal explaining that he had arrived at the Uluhan car dealership at around 10am on Tuesday and fired five shots at its forecourt, injuring two employees, named as Eyup Bilgi and Hidayet Duran.

According to newspaper Yeniduzen, Turgal also explained that the boy had said he had been “incited” to commit the crime by another man, who was arrested on Wednesday, first appeared in court on Thursday, and appeared alongside him in the dock on Friday.

He said searches had been conducted at the man’s business premises and at his house, and that a computer and a mobile phone had been seized as evidence.

As proceedings drew to a close, the boy’s lawyer, Suleyman Sonmezkan, said that his client’s family had been “threatened in Turkey” and that this was the reason for the attack.

Turgal responded, saying that there was “no evidence” of any threats issued, but that evidence had been found suggesting that the boy had received money to commit the crime.

Sonmezkan then said that “he did not intend to kill; he only wounded him in the leg”.

The man’s lawyer, Melih Ilktug, then said that his client did not know the boy or his family.

Both the boy and the man were remanded in custody for a further seven days and will next appear in court next Friday.

The shooting is the latest in a steady flow of shootings in the north which are believed to be linked to the underworld, and provoked disquiet among many local residents, with Turkish Cypriot Nicosia mayor Mehmet Harmanci on Tuesday warning that “our cities … our workplaces, our lives are under threat”.

“In our country, which is filled with cameras everywhere, mafia thugs roam freely with weapons in their hands. Money laundering flows right before our eyes. In this tiny region where the banking system is entirely under control, it is impossible for these things not to be detected,” he said.

He added that the Turkish Cypriot community “needs courageous people … people who will cut off their pipelines and not surrender to the huge sums of money they feed”.

To the north’s ruling coalition, he said, “get out immediately, you have handed the country over to the mafia”, before warning, “get out, because the snake you nurtured will bite you, too”.

Earlier, in response to a previous wave of such incidents last year, Turkish Cypriot opposition political party CTP ‘MP’ Sami Ozuslu had suggested that the north be renamed as the “hitman’s paradise of northern Cyprus”.

“If you have the authority, I would like to request that we change the name of the TRNC to the ‘hitman’s paradise of northern Cyprus’, let it be on the records,” he told the north’s ‘parliament’.

“This is the situation we are currently experiencing.”

In Turkish, the acronym “KKTC”, for “TRNC”, is unchanged if “Turkish republic” is exchanged for “hitman’s paradise”.