The Reşit Kibar Case and the Chain Behind the Trigger
Gunman in Custody, Owner of the Gun Free, Company a Witness, Villager a Defendant
A Lorry Driver at Cankurtaran
The Reşit Kibar Case and the Chain Behind the Trigger
Dear Young Comrades,
On Friday 2 October 2026, the sixth hearing of a case was held at the Artvin Heavy Penal Court. The case bears the name of a man who was shot and killed two years ago because he stood against the felling of a forest: Reşit Kibar. First I will tell the event, and the decision that came out today, briefly. Then we will follow the two-year process hearing by hearing. At the end we will talk about why this case is not only Artvin's, but all of ours.
In brief: what happened?
On 3 September 2024, in the Cankurtaran locality between Borçka and Hopa in Artvin, the felling of trees began in the forest. The felling was being done in order to build there a "forest park and recreation area with accommodation". The villagers had been opposing this for years, because the same ground had earlier been put out to tender for a stone quarry. In their view the "recreation area" was the quarry's new name.
The villagers went to stop the felling. Muhammet Ustabaş, an employee of the company running the project, opened fire on the villagers with a pistol licensed in the name of Fikret Merttürk, one of the company's owners. Reşit Kibar, a 44-year-old TIR lorry driver and father of three, was killed, and two people were wounded.
After the sixth hearing the position is this:
- Ustabaş, who fired, is in custody.
- Fikret Merttürk, the owner of the gun, is not in custody. After the event he was released under judicial control, and the requests for his detention that came at the hearings were rejected every time. At the sixth hearing too.
- Yunus and Eşref Merttürk, the owners of the company that took the project, appear in the file as witnesses. The request for a criminal complaint against them again found no response.
- A case was also opened, on the charges of "simple injury" and "damage to property", against the villagers who defended the forest on the day of the event, and that case was joined to the main file. That is, the villagers are defendants.
The decision of the sixth hearing: The court rejected the requests for detention, decided that Ustabaş's detention would continue, and adjourned the case to 22 January 2027. The family's lawyers asked that a criminal complaint be filed against the company officials and the public officials. The prosecutor asked that these requests be rejected on the ground that they were "not in the nature of new evidence". Two years on, the picture has not changed: the four lines are standing where they stood. The developments through the day can be found, hour by hour, in the Update section at the end of the piece.
Hold these four lines in your mind. The rest of the piece tells why these four lines were arranged in this way.
Who was Reşit Kibar?
Reşit Kibar lived in Hopa, and was originally from the Çiftepınar neighbourhood of Borçka. He was a TIR lorry driver. His brother Şükrü Kibar describes him thus: "My elder brother, clean of heart and open of hand, was known for standing upright before everyone."
The struggle at Cankurtaran was not new for him. In the telling of Kamil Ustabaş, the Eastern Black Sea regional representative of the People's Houses (Halkevleri): "He had resisted the mine that was wanted in the region before. In the later period he was standing against projects camouflaged under the name of tourism."
This detail matters. Reşit Kibar was not an "activist"; he was a worker who earned his living at the wheel. This case is the case of a worker killed while defending the water and the forest of the valley he lived in. Let those who build a wall between the ecological struggle and the class struggle first look at this man's occupation.
Cankurtaran: a short history of a forest
To understand why the event happened, we have to go back before 2024.
Cankurtaran is a forested area between Borçka and Hopa, where the water sources of the village of Çifteköprü lie. For years a stone quarry has been wanted there. A parliamentary inquiry motion that the Republican People's Party (CHP) submitted to the Grand National Assembly in 2020 sums up the process as follows:
- The people of Çifteköprü have been waging a legal struggle for years. Of the cases opened earlier against three quarries, the villagers won all three.
- After losing a case, a company took out a licence again by shrinking the licensed area to 25 hectares.
- On 2 March 2020 the villagers opened a case again, at the Rize Administrative Court, for the annulment of the environmental-impact decision.
Let us follow the next step in TGRT Haber's account: the Regional Directorate of Forestry first gave the quarry tender to the firm İçkale. After the villagers' objections, the project was turned into the "Borçka Cankurtaran Forest Park and Recreation Area Project with Accommodation". On an area of 17.27 hectares the project envisaged a country restaurant, country houses, a place for selling local products, an amphitheatre, an adventure park, and a tent and caravan camp. Yapı-Soy Beton took the project. The villagers did not believe it. A concrete company's felling trees in order to run a country restaurant in a forest looked to them like a quarry changing its clothes.
Young comrades, see two things here:
The first: the villagers knew how to use the law, and they were winning. Three cases, three gains. After every loss, capital shrank the file, changed its name, and came again. A legal victory is only a postponement, for as long as it does not settle the question of property.
The second: it was a public institution that put the forest out to tender. On paper the forest is public property. But the institution deciding in the name of "the public" allocated the forest first to a quarry, then to a tourism investment. It was the tender table, not the villagers, that decided to whose benefit public property would be used.
3 September 2024: what happened that day?
When the felling began, the villagers went to the ground. The gun was in the hand of the company employee Muhammet Ustabaş. The gun belonged to Fikret Merttürk, one of the company's owners, and it was licensed. Ustabaş opened fire. Reşit Kibar was killed, and two people were wounded.
On the day of the event there were not sufficient law-enforcement measures on the ground. It is not only the villagers who say this. At the third hearing of the case the gendarmerie too accepted that sufficient security measures had not been taken.
What followed the event:
- Ustabaş was detained.
- Fikret Merttürk was released under judicial control.
- Among the villagers who defended the forest, Dursun Ali Koyuncu, Mutlu Akyüz and Yıllar Kibar were also taken into custody.
- A secrecy order of six months was placed on the investigation file. According to the family's lawyer, Haktan Özkan, the file was opened to them only about five and a half months after the event.
- Yapı-Soy Beton announced that it was withdrawing from the project: "Our belief continues that no material activity is more valuable than human life."
Is the company's withdrawal a victory? In part. If Cankurtaran's trees are standing today, they paid for it with a human life. Dursun Ali Koyuncu said this at the second-year commemoration: "If Cankurtaran's stone and soil are in place today... it is thanks to the struggle given that day."
The indictment: who is charged with what?
According to Bianet's account there are two defendants in the indictment:
| Defendant | Charge | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Muhammet Ustabaş | Intentional killing of Reşit Kibar; attempted intentional killing of five villagers | In custody |
| Fikret Merttürk | Aiding intentional killing; aiding the attempted killing of five villagers | At liberty under judicial control |
The family's lawyers object to this picture. According to the lawyer Haktan Özkan, the killing was planned and was the work of more than one person. The records of telephone calls (HTS) point to those who instigated it. It is also claimed that during the event Fikret Merttürk incited the attack by telephone and afterwards tried to destroy the evidence. For this reason the lawyers want Yunus and Eşref Merttürk tried as defendants, not as witnesses.
Young comrades, in criminal law the difference between "aiding" and "instigation" is not a small difference of wording. The one who aids is held to have contributed to someone else's offence, and his sentence is reduced. The one who instigates is held to have brought the offence about, and receives the same sentence as the principal. The whole knot of the case lies in the distance between these two words.
Chronology: two years, six hearings
18 April 2025: the first hearing
The case began at the Artvin Heavy Penal Court. The family, the political parties, the environmental organisations and the people of Artvin did not fit into the hall. The hall held 50 people. The lawyers asked for a larger hall, and the court adjourned the hearing to 30 May. What the lawyers said that day was this: This case is not the case of two defendants, but of the whole of the Eastern Black Sea's struggle for life.
30 May 2025: the second hearing
The hearing lasted about 14 hours, it was tense, and two people were taken into custody. In Medyascope's account:
- Ustabaş attended the hearing, rejected the charges and asked to be released.
- Fikret Merttürk attended by SEGBİS, that is, by video link.
- The request for Fikret Merttürk's detention was rejected.
- The court decided that a site inspection would be held at Cankurtaran on 28 August 2025.
The lawyer Haktan Özkan put the essence of the case thus: "Behind this affair there is a company and a group of companies that want to plunder Cankurtaran. And there is a bureaucracy that permits this plunder."
26 September 2025: the third hearing
The gendarmerie accepted that sufficient security measures had not been taken on the day of the event. The court adjourned the case to 30 January 2026 so that the gaps in the file could be completed. Ustabaş's detention continued, and Merttürk remained at liberty.
Özkan's words that day became one of the case's slogans (Medyascope): "There is law in this country. But we saw again today that this law is the law of the companies, the holdings, the mafias." The BirGün report carried the same idea into its headline: "There is the companies' law; there is no law for the villager who defends his valley."
30 January 2026: the fourth hearing
This time the front of the hall was more crowded: representatives of the CHP, the Left Party, Halkevleri, the DEM Party and the Labour Party (EMEP), the Green Artvin Association, the Mayor of Artvin Bilgehan Erdem, and members of parliament were there (Gündem Artvin). Aslı Kahraman Eren, spokesperson of the Karıncalar Black Sea Group: "We will not give up the struggle against those who target Reşit, nature and life. We are not silent, we are not afraid."
The commander of the Borçka Gendarmerie Station was heard as a witness. Fikret Merttürk did not come to the hearing. Even so, the request for his detention was rejected again. The court placed on him a ban on leaving the country and an obligation to sign weekly (Cumhuriyet).
The second important decision at this hearing was the examination of the HTS records. Whether a criminal complaint would be filed against Yunus and Eşref Merttürk was to be assessed after these records and the witness statements. Şükrü Kibar's words: "The evidence is in the open, but Fikret is still outside. We go on struggling against this injustice without fear."
13 May 2026: the fifth hearing
Two important developments took place at this hearing. The first: the case opened against the villagers who defended the forest, on the charges of "simple injury" and "damage to property", was joined to the main file (Yeniçağ). In the same hall, those who fired and those who were fired upon are now both being tried. The lawyer Haktan Özkan criticised it thus: "Villagers who defend their nature and their living space are, under pressure from the companies, being seated in the defendant's chair in criminal trials." The second: Yunus Merttürk, the owner of Yapı-Soy Beton, the company that took the project, was heard as a witness (El Yazmaları, Halk TV).
The request for Fikret Merttürk's detention was this time rejected on the ground that "there is no suspicion of flight" (Politika Haber). The case was adjourned to 2 October.
3 September 2026: the second year
In the second year of his leaving us, Reşit Kibar was commemorated at his grave in Cankurtaran. His brother Ali Şükrü Kibar spoke thus: "If the security forces had done their duty here that day... he would not have died."
29 September 2026: the Halkevleri report
Three days before the hearing, Halkevleri published a report of 15 headings and made a call for 2 October (BirGün, Cumhuriyet). Sevinç Hocaoğulları, the general president of Halkevleri, said that two years on the video recording had still not been analysed: "Even the existing evidence that would secure the prosecution of the defendants was not examined in two years."
According to the lawyer Filiz Orhan, the killing is not an isolated incident. Reşit Kibar was "a very important figure in the ecological struggle and in the people's resistance to the relations of capital and rent." The lawyer Neslihan Varol also recalled that the pressures on the people of the region go back before 2024. Dursun Ali Koyuncu, for example, had been detained on the ground that he had torn off the felling stamps struck onto the trees.
The questions the report asks are these:
- What calls did Fikret Merttürk make with the company managers on the day of the event?
- Why is the person who owns the gun, and who is claimed to be the instigator, not being detained?
- How was the official security plan for the day of the event drawn up, and at whose request?
- What of the relations between company representatives and public officials?
1 October 2026: the Cankurtaran Life Defence Platform
A day before the hearing, the Cankurtaran Life Defence Platform also made a call. The platform's demand is plain: Yunus Merttürk, the owner of the company that took the tender for 17 hectares of forest, should be tried as the instigator of the offence. The same evening, at 20.00, the platform opened a solidarity campaign on X, and gave this word: they would not forget Reşit Kibar, and they would follow the case until those responsible are tried.
2 October 2026: the sixth hearing
Before the hearing, this hearing was seen as "critical" (Gazete Kritik, Nu Medya). Eşref Merttürk, a company official, was to be heard for the first time, and the court could decide on a criminal complaint against the company's owners. We follow what happened at the hearing largely from Muzır's report, signed by Yusuf Çelik.
Who was in the hall? The detained defendant Ustabaş, the defendant at liberty Fikret Merttürk, the four defendants of the joined file opened against the villagers, the Kibar family, and the lawyers. Özgür Özel, general president of the New Party (Yeni Parti), also followed the hearing, and said this to Muzır: "We too will go on following the case and the family's struggle for justice. We will go on standing beside the family's search for justice."
The villager's defence. Gökhan Koyuncu, one of the defendants of the joined file, said in his defence that he did not want the machines, and that this was why he was there. A villager's defence in court is as plain as this: I do not want work machines in my valley.
The company's witness. Eşref Merttürk was connected to the hearing by SEGBİS. According to Politika Haber Merttürk is at the same time the president of the Borçka Chamber of Commerce and Industry. That is, the organised representative of local capital. The sentences that stand out from his statement are these:
- He said he had no closeness with the defendants, that he was related only to Fikret Merttürk, and that he was not at the scene.
- Of the telephone call: "We arranged the call for my work machine."
- Of the tender: "I know about the project. I am also someone who struggled for this project to exist. We put forward a project of this kind in order to prevent forest theft. Once it was put out to tender, those who did not win the tender started a war. The recreation-area project as we know it has nothing to do with a mine."
The family's lawyer, Mürsel Ünder, asked Merttürk whether he had spoken with Ustabaş on the telephone. Merttürk said that Ustabaş's number was not saved on his phone. Ünder showed the HTS records: according to the records, Merttürk had called Ustabaş, and the call had taken place. Merttürk denied this, and said he had only returned the unanswered calls.
The bosses' lawyers' thesis. The defendants' lawyers described the process as a "Valley of the Wolves operation", and said they saw the trial as "a trial in which they were trying to legitimise unlawful acts". They asked for Ustabaş's release.
The family's demands. The Kibar family's lawyers asked that the investigation be widened:
- That a criminal complaint be filed against the company officials who bear responsibility in the event.
- That a criminal complaint be filed against the public officials who bear responsibility in the event. The lawyer Esma Nur Çağlak set out in detail the responsibility of the General Directorate of Forestry, of the gendarmerie personnel, of the Borçka District Governorate, and of certain civilian authorities.
- That the cases to be opened be joined to this file.
- That Fikret Merttürk be detained.
The prosecutor's opinion. The prosecution asked that all the demands be rejected:
- For Fikret Merttürk: "Rejection of the request for detention, on the ground that he has been present at every hearing and that he has a fixed residence."
- For the public officials: rejection of the request, under CMK 206/2-c, because the information and documents in the file were "not in the nature of any new evidence" against the public officials.
- For Eşref and Yunus Merttürk: rejection of the request for a criminal complaint, "because it is not in the nature of new evidence and documents."
- For Ustabaş: continuation of the detention.
The court's decision. After a recess, the court panel rejected the requests for detention, decided that Ustabaş's detention would continue, and adjourned the case to 22 January 2027.
| Demand | Who asked | Prosecutor | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Let Fikret Merttürk be detained | The family's lawyers | Rejection | Rejected |
| A criminal complaint against Yunus and Eşref Merttürk | The family's lawyers | Rejection ("not new evidence") | Found no response |
| A criminal complaint against the public officials | The family's lawyers | Rejection ("not new evidence") | Found no response |
| Let Ustabaş be released | The defendants' lawyers | Rejection | Rejected; the detention continues |
Notice one detail in this table. The prosecutor says "there is no new evidence" for the public officials and the company's owners. Yet, as Halkevleri recalled four days earlier, the video recording in the file has not been analysed in two years. An investigation that does not examine the evidence can afterwards say "there is no new evidence". This is a circle, and it is plain whom this circle serves.
Note this too: the ground given for not detaining Fikret Merttürk is "a fixed residence". A fixed residence is the property owner's oldest guarantee in the law. The villager who defends his valley also has a fixed residence. That residence is the valley itself, which the company's work machines want to enter.
Let us return to the four lines
Let us read again, after the sixth hearing, the four lines at the start of the piece:
- The one who pulled the trigger: in custody.
- The owner of the gun: free.
- The owners of the company: witnesses.
- The villagers who defended the forest: defendants.
After two years and six hearings, nothing in the arrangement has changed. I do not see a coincidence in this. This is the class hierarchy of a judicial mechanism. Criminal responsibility is held in the lowest link of the chain, in the hand of a waged employee. As one climbs the chain, responsibility thins. At the very top, in the capital that owns the project, responsibility turns into "witnessing". At the other end of the chain, for the villager who defends his valley, the defendant's chair is waiting.
We know this pattern from other files too. In the earthquake cases, the contractor being tried while the public official who issued the licence is protected by a permission to investigate; in workplace killings, the foreman being tried while the boss drops out of the file: these are different appearances of the same mechanism.
| Where the court has looked so far | Where it ought to look |
|---|---|
| Who pulled the trigger? | For whose interest was the trigger pulled? |
| In whose name was the gun licensed? | Why was that gun in a tree-felling area? |
| Who did what at the moment of the event? | Who said what in the telephone calls before the event? |
| Did the villagers obstruct the felling? | Why was the forest put out to tender, and how did a quarry become a recreation area? |
| Was the gendarmerie there? | Who drew up the security plan, and at whose request? |
| Two defendants | The company, the group of companies, and the bureaucracy that permitted the plunder |
Three questions: in whose hands, under whose control, for whose benefit?
In whose hands is the forest? On paper, the public's. But the Regional Directorate of Forestry, deciding in the name of the public, opened it first to a quarry tender, then to a concrete company's tourism project. Public property was treated like a plot waiting to be allocated to capital.
Under whose control is the process? In the villagers' hands there was the petition and the court, and they won. But the licence was given again, the project's name was changed, and the felling began again. On the day of the felling the company's armed employee was on the ground, and there was not sufficient law enforcement. Control, on the ground and at the table, was in capital's hands.
For whose benefit? It was not the villager who was going to profit, either from the quarry or from the country restaurant. What fell to the villager's share was the pollution of his water, the felling of his forest, and, when he stood against it, the defendant's chair. What fell to Reşit Kibar's share was death.
At Akbelen and at Cankurtaran we see the same process: the conditions of production and of life of the labourers living in the countryside, that is their soil, their water, their forest, are being seized. We call this dispossession. What does it is a process of capital accumulation given names such as "the public interest", "tourism", "security of energy supply". Everyone who stands in the way of this process is seen as an obstacle. Sometimes by a court ruling, sometimes by the gendarmerie, and sometimes by a pistol.
The law and the struggle
The lesson to be drawn from this case for the young comrades is this: the legal struggle is necessary, but on its own it is not enough.
The villagers of Cankurtaran won three cases, and capital came back every time. Everything obtained so far in the Reşit Kibar case, for example the examination of the HTS records, the calling of the company's owners as witnesses, and the file's remaining on the public agenda, is the product of the crowd outside the hall. At the first hearing, the crowd that would not fit into a hall of 50 turned the lawyers' words, "this is not the case of two people", into a concrete force.
The court writes onto paper the balance of forces built in the street; it does not create that force itself. For this reason, what will bring this case to a conclusion is the organisation outside the hall as much as the argument inside it.
Concrete tasks
- Follow the case, and write it. Follow the hearings, record the interim decisions, tell them around you. Impunity feeds on silence.
- Keep the chronology in your hand. To someone who does not know it, the two-year process looks like a single news item. Share the chronology in this piece, and draw a chronology of this kind for the similar files in your own region too.
- Tell ecology in the language of class. Reşit Kibar was a TIR lorry driver. It was labourers who drank Cankurtaran's water and made their living from its forest. Refuse the question "nature, or development?"; the right question is "Whose development?"
- Ask the responsibility of public officials. At whose request was the security plan drawn up? Why was the forest put out to tender? Carry these questions to members of parliament, to the professional chambers, to the press.
- Bind the local struggles to one another. See the villagers of Akbelen, of Cankurtaran, of Kaz Dağları and of Munzur on the same map. Capital wants to keep these files apart from one another. Our task is to join them.
- Stand also by the villagers' being tried. It is unacceptable that those who defend the forest sit in the defendant's chair. The case has been joined to the main file. This means that solidarity has to be joined as well.
Close
The bullet that killed Reşit Kibar came out of a pistol. But what brought that pistol to Cankurtaran was a quarry that had to be opened for profit, the putting out to tender of a forest that on paper is public property, and the law enforcement that ought to have been on the ground that day and was not. The gunman has to be tried. But a trial limited to the gunman means acquitting the rest of the chain.
Cankurtaran's trees are standing today. We won this at the cost of a lorry driver's life. The account of that life will not close until every link of the chain has been tried.
Before his death, Reşit Kibar had written this comment on a live broadcast: "When a tree is cut, a prayer is recited!" Let us complete his words:
When a tree is cut, a prayer is recited. When a person is killed, an account is demanded.
Update
2 October 2026, 09.30: The sixth hearing began at the Artvin Heavy Penal Court.
2 October 2026, 11.30: Özgür Özel, general president of the New Party, came to the Artvin Courthouse to follow the hearing. He was met in front of the courthouse by Reşit Kibar's family, and after speaking with the family for a while he entered the hall (Evrensel/ANKA, Haberler.com).
2 October 2026, 13.00: The statement expected in the morning session was taken. Eşref Merttürk, the company's owner, was heard as a witness. The family's lawyers made two demands (Gündem Artvin):
- Let Fikret Merttürk be detained. This demand is repeated at every hearing, and until now it has always been rejected.
- Let Yunus and Eşref Merttürk be defendants. The lawyer Haktan Özkan: "We, as the lawyers of the file, of course argue that these people ought to be included in the file not as witnesses, but as defendants."
Tahsin Ocaklı, the New Party's member of parliament for Rize, who was following the hearing, also asked that a criminal complaint be filed against the two company owners. The hearing is continuing after the lunch break.
2 October 2026, 13.52: While the hearing was going on, the Platform of the Communists of Turkey posted this on X:
"#ReşitKibar was killed, while defending the forest and nature, by the hired killer of a company that has the government's support behind it. We will not leave off the killers' trail. Reşit Kibar, Hakan Tosun, Ayşin and Ali Büyüknohutçu, Metin Lokumcu"
The list of names at the end of the post takes this case out of being a single event. For that reason let us remember the names on the list one by one:
- Ali Ulvi and Ayşin Büyüknohutçu were a couple in Antalya who struggled against stone and marble quarries. Ali Ulvi was the spokesperson of the Platform Against Stone Quarries, and by way of the law they had had a quarry closed. On 9 May 2017 they were found killed in their house in Finike. The gunman went to prison, but a decision of non-prosecution was given for the quarry owners who were claimed to have instigated the killing. As their daughter Emine Büyüknohutçu said, the family wants to find not the gunman but those behind him (Bianet). The question asked at Cankurtaran today is the same question that was asked in Finike nine years ago.
- Hakan Tosun was a journalist and documentary-maker who recorded the struggles over nature and the city, and the Validebağ resistance. On 10 October 2025 he was beaten in the street in Esenyurt, Istanbul, and on 13 October brain death occurred. His case began in Bakırköy in May 2026 (Medyascope).
- Metin Lokumcu was a retired teacher from Hopa, where Reşit Kibar lived. On 31 May 2011, in Hopa, he lost his life after the pepper gas the police fired at a protest against hydroelectric plants and against the plunder in the region.
Farmers who stood against a quarry, a journalist who recorded an urban forest, a teacher who marched against a hydroelectric plant, a lorry driver who defended a forest. Their occupations differ; their struggle is the same: they stood against the opening of their living spaces to capital, and they paid for it with their lives. Impunity too has a common pattern: the gunman is sometimes tried, and the chain behind him almost never.
2 October 2026, 15.53: The hearing ended. According to Muzır's account the court rejected the requests for detention, decided that Ustabaş's detention would continue, and adjourned the case to 22 January 2027. The prosecutor asked that the family's lawyers' requests for a criminal complaint against the company officials and the public officials be rejected, on the ground that they were "not in the nature of new evidence". The detail of the hearing is in the section "2 October 2026: the sixth hearing" above.
The seventh hearing is on 22 January 2027. This piece will be updated again at that hearing.
Sources
- Bianet: "Reşit Kibar: everyone's elder brother, everyone's uncle"
- Grand National Assembly: the CHP Group's inquiry motion on the Cankurtaran quarries (2020)
- TGRT Haber: one person who opposed the mine and recreation project in Artvin had died; the firm announced its decision on the project
- Bianet: the Reşit Kibar case was adjourned (the first hearing)
- sendika.org: the lawyers objected to the hall's being small, and the hearing was adjourned to 30 May
- Medyascope: the Reşit Kibar case was adjourned to 26 September
- Medyascope: the Reşit Kibar murder case was adjourned to 30 January 2026
- BirGün: "There is the companies' law; there is no law for the villager who defends his valley"
- Gündem Artvin: the Reşit Kibar hearing began (the fourth hearing)
- Cumhuriyet: the "instigator" argument continues in the Reşit Kibar case
- Halk TV: the Reşit Kibar case was adjourned; the request that "the instigator be detained" was rejected
- Politika Haber: in the Reşit Kibar case Merttürk was again not detained
- El Yazmaları: in the second year of Reşit Kibar's killing, how is the case proceeding?
- Bianet: Reşit Kibar was commemorated at his grave in the second year of his death
- BirGün: a call to the Reşit Kibar case: all those responsible must give an account
- Cumhuriyet: Halkevleri's call to the Reşit Kibar hearing
- Gazete Duvar: Reşit Kibar had commented on a live broadcast: "When a tree is cut, a prayer is recited!"
- Bianet: Halkevleri's call to the hearing on 2 October
- Gazete Kritik: a critical hearing in Reşit Kibar's case
- Nu Medya: the sixth hearing in the Reşit Kibar case
- Yeniçağ: the case of Reşit Kibar, killed because he defended his nature, was adjourned (the fifth hearing)
- Artı Gerçek: the Reşit Kibar case: those who defend their nature became defendants
- BirGün: a call for solidarity for Reşit Kibar: "We will follow the case"
- Evrensel/ANKA: Özgür Özel at the Artvin Courthouse for the sixth hearing of the Reşit Kibar case
- Haberler.com: Özgür Özel came to the Artvin Courthouse for the sixth hearing of the Reşit Kibar case
- Gündem Artvin: at the sixth hearing, Fikret Merttürk's detention was requested
- Platform of the Communists of Turkey, post on X (2 October 2026)
- Bianet: Killing of environmentalist couple not solved since 2017
- Medyascope: the case of the killing of the journalist Hakan Tosun is beginning
- Muzır (Yusuf Çelik): the requests for detention in the Reşit Kibar case were rejected
- Muzır Yayın, post on X (2 October 2026)
- Politika Haber: the sixth hearing in the Reşit Kibar case: a request for a criminal complaint against the company managers
