The Somali president’s son is charged with manslaughter for running over and killing a delivery driver in Istanbul. According to Turkish media, he fled and now has an international arrest warrant.
The case, reported among others by the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu – an opponent of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – is causing a stir since the suspect, Mohammed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, was released without judicial supervision after a first police report, according to the Cumhuriyet newspaper.
“The suspect left Turkey with his hands free,” Imamoglu declared indignantly on X (formerly Twitter). “The prevailing mentality (that) turns a blind eye and allows this escape is unfortunately incapable of defending the rights of its citizens in its own country,” he adds.
According to the police report, cited by the Haber network, the son of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud collided with a delivery driver who was riding a motorcycle on November 30.
The victim, Yunus Emre Göcer, a father of two, was violently thrown onto the road and died six days later in hospital.
The prosecutor issued an arrest warrant against the driver. “But when the police went to the suspect’s home on Friday, he had been missing since December 2,” the Haber channel reported.
For this reason, the Istanbul Prosecutor General’s Office “issued an international arrest warrant against him on December 8, 2023,” the television network added.
The delivery driver’s lawyer, Iyaz Cimen, cited by Cumhuriyet, denounced the first report of the traffic police, which attributed responsibility for the accident to the “recklessness” of the victim.
“A second expert report with video recordings showed that the driver of the vehicle was 100% guilty,” he added, fearing however that the latter “will never be arrested.”
For a decade, Turkey has maintained close relations with Somalia, a “brother country” of 17 million inhabitants, mostly Muslims, in the Horn of Africa (east), and is its main economic partner, especially in the construction, education, health and military cooperation.