Eren Keskin, vice president of Turkey’s Human Rights Association and a prominent attorney, tweeted Dec. 9, “We just received news of our client Garibe Gezer’s suicide from prison. She was a survivor of torture.” Keskin questioned how an inmate in solitary confinement could have committed suicide and lamented that the Gezer family from Dargecit, Mardin, had already suffered so much.

Keskin’s sorrow was potent on the phone when we spoke on Dec. 15. She explained that Gezer was imprisoned in 2016 on “specious charges” as a part of sweeping arrests of hundreds of Kurds involved in politics. Gezer was not involved in any sort of militant terrorist activities. She was a “strong woman who would not bow,” Keskin commented. 

Most of the charges against her were based on the testimony of a secret witness, Ayse Acar Basaran, spokesperson for the People's Democratic Party (HDP) Women’s Assembly, told Al-Monitor. The witness, codenamed Burhan, has been missing for the last five years but his unverified testimony was sufficient to send Gezer to a high-security prison for life. 

The cause of her death is not clear, as the autopsy was conducted without her attorney. Even if it was suicide, Eren and other human rights observers as well as HDP politicians suspect that she was brought to the brink of death by physical and psychological torture.