Ali Ismail Korkmaz, 19, was savagely clubbed in the head during recent anti-government government protests in Turkey. While he fought for his life for five weeks, almost no effort was made to find the assailants, who, witnesses say, were plainclothes police and government sympathizers. When the young man perished on July 10, the local governor’s reaction bordered on the cynical as he suggested that fellow protesters could have beaten up Korkmaz to defame the police. As the probe finally moved on, key security camera footage from the crime scene was mysteriously damaged, while the photos of officers on duty in the area, provided by police to prosecutors to “help” identification, turned out to be years old.

Korkmaz’s case is emblematic of the shield rising around the violent police conduct while a judicial onslaught targets the demonstrators, hardening the very sentiment that unleashed the protest wave — that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is growing authoritarian and polarizing the nation. 

“We no longer expect justice at the courts, but Allah’s justice is omnipotent,” Emel Korkmaz, the young man’s mother, told Al-Monitor on July 26, fighting back tears.

Her elder son, Gurkan Korkmaz, a lawyer, said only one civilian had been so far identified and arrested from the group of men who clubbed his brother late on June 2 in a side street in Eskisehir, where he was a university student. “They will probably put the whole blame on that man and wind up the case,” he said.