A RETIRED Turkish Cypriot army officer and former politician yesterday broke his silence to hit back at accusations that he gave the order to shoot and kill Solomos Solomou as he tried to pull down a ‘TRNC’ flag at the Dherynia crossing in 1996.
Solomou was shot and killed during the worst and only outbreak of intercommunal violence since the Turkish invasion in 1974.
The accusations came from the north’s former ‘agriculture minister’ Kenan Akin, who was photographed shooting at Solomou and whose arrest was ordered soon after by Interpol.
Akin, who has never been arrested by the Turkish or Turkish Cypriot authorities for his suspected involvement in the killing, and who is again running for political office in the north’s coming general election on April 19, recently claimed that the retired officer, Halil Sadrazam, had given the order to shoot Solomou as he sought to lower the flag.
“I was not in the chain of command,” Sadrazam said yesterday at a press conference he called to clear his name.
While admitting he was at the Dherynia crossing point the day Solomou was shot, Sadrazam said his role as an officer was merely to communicate events on the ground to his superiors. He added that no Turkish Cypriot officers were in command at the crossing on the day.
Recounting events on August 11, 1996, Sadrazam said that after warning shots had been fired over the crowd of around 2,000 people protesting the death of two Greek Cypriots at the crossing point three days earlier, he phoned his superiors to inform them of the “uncontrolled shooting” that had broken out. He did not, he said, give an order to shoot. Neither did he have the authority to do so.
He added that he did not believe “any officer asked for or ordered Akin to shoot”.
“I don’t know whether he [Akin] used his own pistol to shoot […] but after the shots had died down, I went up to the balcony [where Akin had been photographed shooting at Solomou] and he was there,” Sadrazam said, adding that he could confirm that the photographs taken were of Akin.
Strongly inferring that Akin had at least tried to kill Solomou, and that he had done so without receiving orders, Sadrazam said “For Akin to take out his pistol and take aim and try to shoot at a person is a crime”.
Sadrazam believes Akin’s accusations about the order to shoot stem from Akin’s “efforts to escape international justice and pin the blame on others”. He also believed that Akin, by saying he had received orders from a military superior, was seeking to divert the blame from himself.
“It was only after he [Akin] was arrested in Istanbul in 2004 trying to smuggle two suitcases full of mobile phones into Turkey that my name was mentioned in relation to the events at Dherynia,” Sadrazam said.
“After that, he started talking about the events, and about me, and managed to present himself as a hero. Soon everyone forgot about his smuggling,” Sadrazam said.
The retired officer added that the fact that Akin had been assigned the portfolio of ‘agriculture minister’ just days after the shooting could also have been an attempt by the north’s administration at the time to protect him from justice.
Kenan Akin is currently hoping to gain a seat in the Turkish Cypriot ‘parliament’ as member of the right-wing Freedom and Reform Party (ORP). Halil Sadrazam, as well as being a retired officer of the Turkish Cypriot army, is also a former deputy of the now-disbanded, pro-reunification Peace and Democracy Movement (BDH).
