Ayhan Çarkın

Ayhan Çarkın (1962, Erzurum) was a policeman. He was a member of its special forces unit, and says with the sanction of state officials he personally killed 1000 people at the height of the Kurdish–Turkish conflict. The leader of the Special Operations Department (Turkish: Özel Harekât Dairesi), İbrahim Şahin, said Çarkın was the most fearless policeman he had ever met.

Çarkın grew up in Erzincan. He came from an underprivileged family that was unable to fund his high school education; he dropped out. The year after the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was established (1984), he signed up to the police force. He received training in special warfare from Korkut Eken. He was deployed in Diyarbakır under chief Şahin, who described Çarkın as his best man. He gained a reputation for conducting lightning-fast raids—350 in all—though some have suggested the possibility that some of his victims might have been innocent. He was active in southeast Turkey from 1986 to 1990.

Later, Şahin took Çarkın to Istanbul to target Dev-Sol militants. He led a raid on 12 July 1991 in which eleven were killed. Relatives of the victims took the state to the European Court of Human Rights, and won the case. Çarkın's next raid was on 16 April 1992; three were killed. Twenty people including Çarkın were sued; this time he was acquitted. Another was the "Perpa" raid on 13 August 1993 in which Selma Çıtlak, Mehmet Salgın, Sabri Atılmış, Hakan Kasa, and Mehmet Akyürek were killed. Five of the eight participating policemen were initially sentenced to death, but this was reduced to three years and ten months in prison. They were all acquitted by the Supreme Court of Appeals.

Çarkın was involved in the events that led to the scandal. Specifically, he was part of the elite Police Special Operation Teams department (Turkish: Özel Tim) that was responsible for assassinating businessmen suspected of financially supporting the PKK. One of these was allegedly the so-called "casino king", Ömer Lütfü Topal, assassinated in July 1996. Çarkın's associates included Ayhan Akça, Oğuz Yorulmaz, Ercan Ersoy, and the notorious Abdullah Çatlı. Three (excluding Çatlı) were detained, but released on the orders of the chief of police, Mehmet Ağar, and transferred to become bodyguards for another key figure in the scandal, Sedat Bucak.

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