On Saturday, hundreds of women protested in Turkey against a spate of murders of women. The rallies were in response to a recent double murder in Istanbul.
Hundreds of people in Istanbul chanted slogans condemning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist AKP party. Other protests took place in the capital Ankara and Izmir, another major city, according to photos on social media.
Istanbul officials said the suspect and the two women were each 19 years old. The women were killed 30 minutes apart, they added.
Erdogan has been criticised for initially blaming alcohol and social media, but later pledged to tighten the justice system and crack down harder on crime as Turkey struggles to contain a wave of murders of women. One of the rally’s organisers, Gunes Fadime Aksahin, told the crowd that his government “lets young girls get killed.”
Protests have been taking place daily for a week across the country, mainly on university campuses, following the recent double murder of two young women, sparking anger across the country. A man arrested on suspicion of killing two young women on the same night committed suicide last week, which also provoked protests.
One monitoring group said there have been 299 murders of women this year in the country of 85 million people, with more than 160 “suspicious” killings officially classified as suicides or accidents. In 2021, Turkey withdrew from the Council of Europe convention on the prevention of violence against women, known as the Istanbul Convention, which obliges national authorities to investigate and punish cases of violence against women.
