7 of one Kurdish family killed by gunmen in Turkey

SANAA, Jul. 31 (YPA) – Seven members of the same Kurdish family were killed in an armed attack on their home in Konya, central Turkey, on Friday, in a crime that human rights activists said was racist.
According to Turkish media, the seven members of the Dedeoglu family were killed by gunmen who attacked their house and tried to burn it.
Members of this family were seriously injured last May in an attack by a number of their neighbors because of their Kurdish nationalism, telling them, “Kurds are not allowed to live here,” according to what the Gazet Duvar news website quoted in mid-July from a member of this family who was killed on Friday.
On that day, the victim accused the police and judiciary of favoring the attackers, stressing that all family members feared for their lives.
According to the victims’ defense attorney, Abdurrahman Karabulut, the release of the perpetrators of the first attack gave them a sense of impunity.
“It is a completely racist attack… the judiciary and the authority bear their share of responsibility for what happened,” Karabulut told the “Arte TV” channel.
But the authorities were quick to deny the racist nature of the crime.
Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters that the crime was caused by a chronic animosity between two families, considering it a provocation to consider what happened a racist crime.
“This attack has nothing to do with the Turkish-Kurdish question,” he added. The link between these two things is as dangerous as the attack.”
However, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party rejected the minister’s statement, considering that the crimes that Konya witnessed, in which Kurdish citizens were killed, fall within the framework of the attacks targeting the Kurds, which have increased in frequency in recent years.
This is the second deadly attack targeting the Kurds in Konya in a month.