IZMIR, Turkey — On June 17 at 10:50 a.m., a bulky young man with tattoos and cut-off gloves, wearing a leather vest and carrying a heavy bag, walked into the Izmir office of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and fired four shots into a young female party volunteer. Then he took a photo of her as she lay on the floor dying and posted it on his WhatsApp status with the word “Body 1.”
Onur Gencer, a health worker who served with Turkish special forces in Syria’s Manbij in January-February 2020, told the police that he had intended to kill more people but was “disappointed to find [just Deniz Poyraz] there.” What he initially planned to do, he told the police in his 27-page testimony, was to kill Kurdish political figures such as HDP’s imprisoned former co-chair Selahattin Demirtas, HDP’s current co-chair Pervin Buldan and veteran Kurdish politician Leyla Zana. Realizing that this would be too difficult, he set out to attack the party office in Izmir. Then he loitered around the building till he learned the local members’ daily schedule and purchased at least one gun to carry out the attack. “I acted alone,” he said in his initial statement to the police.
