MizginTabu/JINHA

AMED – After two DHKC members took a lawyer hostage with the demand that the state release the names of the police responsible for killing teenager Berkin Elvan, both the militants and the prosecutor lost their lives in the police intervention.

Lawyers say the indiscriminate use of force in the operation was unnecessary and a harbinger of further deadly police interventions enabled by the recently passed Internal Security Law.The recently passed Internal Security Law has given police in Turkey the right to use deadly force with little restraint.

On Tuesday, DHKC (Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front) members ŞafakYayla and BahtiyarDoğruyol entered the Çağlayan Courthouse in Istanbul, taking prosecutor Mehmet SelimKiraz hostage. Mehmet Selim had been the prosecutor in the case of Berkin Elvan, the 15-year-old boy slain by a police tear gas canister during the course of the Gezi protests.

Both the DHKC members and the prosecutor were killed in a police operation that many are calling unnecessary, given the DHKC members' relatively simple demand for the release of the officers' names (which they ultimately accomplished by releasing documents on social media before they were killed).

Lawyers say the state's reaction to the case is worrying. The Turkish government immediately issued a ban on media coverage of the event. Police have now begun investigations against newspapers that broadcast photographs of the prosecutor.

Gamza Yalçın, a lawyer with the Diyarbakır Human Rights Association, says lawyers from the Turkey Bar Association facilitated a dialogue during the course of the action, but security forces pushed for the use of deadly force.

"When you look at the event, from the time that the prosecutor was taken hostage, this could have been solved by dialogue. But no one came out alive from that room," said Gamze. She pointed out that it has been extraordinarily easy for the state to present the immediate killing of the hostage-takers as "normal," simply because of the act they committed.

"No one should have their life violated, whether or not they carry out this kind of action," she said. "Security forces need to be more careful in these kinds of actions and take measures to protect the right to life."

Gamze recommended that laws like the Internal Security Law immediately be revised and said Turkey is in need of a democratic, revised constitution.

(zd/fk/cm)