Mehmet Selim Buğrahan, an 87-year-old Kurdish man, has died in a hospital following a heart attack suffered in Kahramanmaraş Prison, where he was put 45 days earlier after a regional appeals court upheld a four-year jail sentence on terrorism charges, Turkish media reported.
Buğrahan had first been detained in 2014 for allegedly supporting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging a bloody insurgency for decades in Turkey’s Southeast and is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the EU and the US.
He was released pending trial after seven months in pretrial detention.
This year a regional appeals court upheld his four-year, two-month prison sentence.
According to the reports, one of his children is also in jail on terrorism charges.
Kurdish journalist Fehim Işık tweeted that Buğrahan’s lawyer had applied for a suspended sentence due to his advanced age and chronic illnesses.
