North ‘parliament speaker’ ‘naturalised people he coerced into breaking law’

The north’s ‘parliament speaker’ Ziya Ozturkler was on Thursday accused in court of gifting ‘TRNC’ citizenship to people he had coerced into handing out degree certificates under false pretences during his time as ‘interior minister’.

The accusation was made by the former secretary-general of Morphou’s now infamous Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University (KSTU) Serdal Gunduz, who was himself sentenced in November last year to 15 years in jail for his part in the “fake diploma scandal”, and who submitted a written witness statement which was read out in court on Thursday.

While Ozturkler was not in the dock on Thursday – it is ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel’s longtime close personal associate Fatma Unal who is on trial – Gunduz charged that it was Ozturkler who leveraged his political power to ensure that Unal be issued a degree from the KSTU without having studied at the university.

Gunduz’s statement read that “another thing I remember is that one day, the then interior minister Ziya Ozturkler called me and said ‘give Fatma Unal her diploma and have her graduate’”.

“Afterwards, he said on the phone that the citizenship application of the vice rector [of the KSTU] Serdal Isiktas was in front of him for his signature. I told him that this department was under Isiktas’ supervision,” he wrote.

He added that Ozturkler “had told me that Fatma Unal was very powerful within the UBP and then hung up the phone”, with the UBP being the north’s largest political party, and the party to which Ozturkler and Ustel both belong.

“Another thing I remember is that after Fatma Unal’s graduation, Serdal Isiktas’ citizenship application process and that of his wife were completed. When I asked Serdal Isiktas one day how he obtained citizenship so quickly, he said, without naming names, that he received support from someone inside the UBP,” he wrote.

He added that Isiktas had said he was also helped by “a man named Erhan Akar who works at the interior ministry”.

Akar was hired by Ozturkler as director of the north’s migration department in 2022, and was later appointed as director of then Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar’s press office in April last year, before being relieved of his duties by Tatar’s successor Tufan Erhurman last November.

In specifics, Akar was hired by Ozturkler on September 13, 2022, the KSTU’s online database was altered to show that Unal had graduated on September 22, 2022, and Isiktas was naturalised as a citizen of the ‘TRNC’ on November 8, 2022.

Ozturkler denies all the accusations made against him, and asked the Turkish Cypriot legislature on Tuesday, “are we going to act based on the reputation of someone who received a 15-year jail sentence and has been convicted on hundreds of counts?”.

Serious allegations were also made against Fatma Unal on Thursday, with police sergeant Bilger Koral also appearing as a witness.

Koral told the court that signatures on a document approving Unal’s thesis belonging to three faculty members had been forged, and also recounted that he had questioned Unal regarding the validity or otherwise of her degree from the KSTU in July 2024.

He said he had asked her, “where is the diploma you received from the KSTU?”, and that she told him, in the presence of her lawyer, that he had never attended the university.

“I never went to that school. I was never enrolled. I have no connection whatsoever with that school. They used my name because of my position. I neither wrote a thesis nor attended classes. I do not even know where the school is located,” he quoted her as having said.

The next hearing of the case will take place on Monday.