Missing Turkish worker follows similar pattern of forced disappearances
Human rights experts consider the involuntary disappearance of opposition activists at the hands of the state to be "sheer lawlessness."
“I want my child, I want my child alive. Whatever they did with my child, they need to bring him back.” The tearful appeal to Turkish authorities came from Nazife Gunes, the mother of 23-year-old Gokhan Gunes, a construction worker with socialist leanings who has been missing from his Istanbul home for the past five days.
His family says Gunes was bundled into a car and whisked away to an unknown destination on Jan. 20, most likely by undercover police, after he got off a bus outside his workplace in Istanbul’s Basaksehir neighborhood.
Turkish authorities have turned a deaf ear to the Gunes family’s entreaties to find their son, even after they presented what they say is visual evidence of his abduction captured by security cameras outside the construction site run by Turev Insaat.
Gunes’ story chimes with a pattern of forced disappearances of dissidents that has emerged in the wake of the 2016 coup attempt. The bulk of the targets are alleged disciples of Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based imam who Ankara accuses of masterminding the putsch.
