A prison warden who lost his job was found hanging from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeastern city of Adiyaman. Enver Senturk’s apparent suicide on Oct. 12 was the third self-inflicted death in as many days over alleged links to Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Turkish cleric whom the government blames for the July 15 coup attempt.
On Oct. 11, Hasan Tastan, an imam, hanged himself after his son, a schoolteacher, was arrested on charges of membership in the Gulen movement, or what the Turkish government calls the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization. A day earlier, a noncommissioned officer detained on the same offense locked himself in the toilet, swallowed detergent and collapsed on the floor and died. On Oct. 6, a police officer, one among the estimated 13,000 police personnel sacked over alleged links to Gulen, shot himself in the head. At least two other Gulen-linked suicides were reported last month. The independent online news portal T24 estimates that there have been at least 17 Gulen-linked suicides thus far. The deaths have elicited little attention or sympathy. There may be several reasons for this.
