Turkish court forgoes probe into Vartinis massacre on grounds of time, cost

A Turkish court has withdrawn an order to conduct an on-site investigation into a 1993 incident in which nine family members were allegedly burned to death by the military, announcing that it wanted to finish the case "inexpensively" and "as soon as possible."

Last year, the K?r?kkale Court of Serious Crimes ordered a renewed investigation in the eastern province of Mu? in which the Ö?üt family's house was burned, leading to the deaths of a man, his pregnant wife and seven of their children.

The Oct. 3, 1993, incident in Mu?'s Alt?nova village has become known as the Vartinis massacre, after the Kurdish name of the village.

In a hearing late on Jan. 12, however, the court ruled that the Kobane protests of Oct. 6-8, 2014, during which over 40 people were killed in solidarity protests with the Syrian Kurdish town under attack from jihadists, had made it unsafe to conduct the investigation.

Additionally, the court said it had withdrawn the investigation order so as to "complete the trial as soon as possible and as cheaply as possible," justifying its decision with regulations that enjoin the judiciary to complete trials within an acceptable period of time, according to the Dicle News Agency.

Five senior members of the Gendarmerie in the area have been facing charges of premeditated murder of more than one person in the case, in which the military allegedly incinerated the Ö?üt family's house after a sergeant was killed in the area.

The decision elicited fury from the family's lawyer, Kadir Karaçelik. "You didn't think about the cost of the violation of the lives of nine people; you're thinking about the costs of an investigation."

Karaçelik also lamented that the judiciary had failed to collect sufficient...