Ex-police officer given aggravated life sentence for Ayşe Tokyaz murder
The court sentenced Cemil K., a former police officer who killed university student Ayşe Tokyaz and left her body in a suitcase by the roadside, to aggravated life imprisonment for premeditated murder of a woman committed with monstrous feeling and by inflicting torment.
RastinewsA verdict has been delivered in the case of Ayşe Tokyaz, a university student killed by former police officer Cemil K. and whose body was dumped in a suitcase by the roadside. The Küçükçekmece 2nd High Criminal Court sentenced Cemil K. to aggravated life imprisonment for premeditated murder of a woman committed with monstrous feeling and by inflicting torment.
Among the defendants said to have helped the perpetrator, Oğuz K. was sentenced to five years, police officer İlker U.U. to seven years and six months, and Barış C. A. to five years. Another defendant, M. E. A., was acquitted.
Women's groups point to police cooperating with the killer
Speaking outside the Küçükçekmece 2nd High Criminal Court before the hearing, women's organisations said justice being served would send "a strong message to society so that similar suffering is never repeated."
According to DW, Şirin Yalıncakoğlu, the Istanbul representative of the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, said Ayşe Tokyaz had been beaten by a former police officer, killed brutally and her body forced into a suitcase. Yalıncakoğlu argued that public officials had worked "to save their fellow officers."
A statement on behalf of Feminists Against Femicide pointed to the role in the case of the men who carried the suitcase out of the flat, alongside the police officers alleged to have stalled and harassed Tokyaz's sister Esra at the police station and passed her statement to the killer. Neither the police nor judicial authorities have commented on these allegations.
Ayşe Tokyaz was killed about a year ago in Istanbul's Küçükçekmece district, and her body was found in a suitcase by the roadside on 13 July 2025. Prosecutors had also sought penalties against Cemil K. for deprivation of liberty by threat and for blackmail.
Cemil K. is also alleged to have killed Ejegul Ovezova, a Turkmen national with whom he had lived in Diyarbakır. Ovezova died on 24 July 2023 after falling from the eighth floor of the flat she was in; no detention order was issued against Cemil K. after that incident.
Proceedings over Ovezova's suspicious death are continuing, with the next hearing set for 16 October. Cemil K. maintains that Ovezova "took her own life." According to information made public, Cemil K. was dismissed from the police in 2024 for possessing an unlicensed firearm.