Wife of Turkish journalist Yusuf Inan who was extradited from Ukraine to Turkey on July 15, says her husband was arrested and sent to Turkey illegally.
Inan was wanted in Turkey as a member of the opposition movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based preacher and opposition leader whom Ankara blames for the coup attempt in 2016.
He was arrested and sent to Turkey just three days after another alleged member of Turkish opposition living in Ukraine, Imam Salih Zeki Yigit, was extradited to Turkey in the same abrupt fashion that suggested a violation of the regular extradition procedures.
While Ukrainian authorities didn’t comment on the extraditions, Inan’s wife Kateryna Inan says Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) officers arrested her husband.
Inan leads the news website opposition to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and favorable for Gulen.
Kateryna Inan told the Kyiv Post by phone that her husband had a residency permit in Ukraine which he got after they married in 2015. They lived in Mykolayiv, a city in southern Ukraine some 480 kilometers from Kyiv, where Inan was earning his living by breeding sheep at the farm near the city.
She said that on July 12, three SBU officers arrived at his farm, showed their IDs and said he was wanted in Izmir, his hometown in Turkey. Inan doesn’t speak Russian, so he couldn’t understand their demands and called his wife and the police.
Along with the police arrived another SBU car, where three masked SBU officers arrested Inan by force and “pushed him into the car like a dog,” the woman said.
On the next day, July 13, a court in Mykolayiv ruled for the extradition of Inan, who was then kept at a local pre-trial detention center. His lawyer started preparing an appeal and application for his asylum in Ukraine. The lawyer wanted to file an appeal on July 16, knowing the law allowed five days for that.
“But on Sunday (July 15) evening I found out from the Turkish media that my husband was already on the Turkish territory,” Inan’s wife said. “Prosecution keeps silence, SBU keeps silence. Nobody told us that he’s not here anymore, that he was brought away secretly.”
Spokespersons of SBU, Prosecutor General’s Office, State Migration Service and State Border Service told the Kyiv Post they had no information about the arrest of Inan, as well as about the arrest of Yigit, who lived in Odesa and was flown to Istanbul on July 12.
The Turkish Embassy called the arrests and extraditions “a part of ongoing security cooperation between Turkey and Ukraine.”
Now Kateryna Inan is trying to get information about her husband through his elder son living in Turkey.
Yunus Erdogdu, a Turkish journalist working in Ukraine who is covering the arrest in his blog, said both arrests were abductions. He says he feels unsafe now in Ukraine.
The two arrests of Turkish residents are reminiscent to the abduction of Palestinian national Dirar Abu Sisi, who was captured by Israeli security services on a train in Ukraine in 2011. An eye-witness of the arrest told the Kyiv Post that one of two men who arrested Abu Sisi also showed the SBU ID. The SBU has never admitted being involved in that operation.
