Brutal femicide in Turkey: he took selfies with his pregnant wife on a cliff and threw her into the void

The smile Semra Aysal had in the last photos she took on vacation contrasts with the sad ending she had a few minutes later. Her husband Hakan Aysal pushed her off a cliff in the Turkish province of Izmir, with the intention of collecting life insurance money, whether or not seven months pregnant, according to the prosecutor’s complaint of February 8.

Aysal’s death occurred on June 19, 2018 and two years later the man was arrested and charged with murder. Wife fell more than 300 meters and died instantly.

According to the newspaper The sun, the 40-year-old widower denied being responsible for his wife’s death. “After taking a photo, my wife put the phone in her purse. Later he asked me to give him the phone. I stood up and heard my wife screaming behind me when I took a few steps away to take the phone out of her bag, ”he said.

// They shot a young man from a bridge and uploaded the video to TikTok

However, Justice doesn’t think it was an accident, but a coldly planned crime. Prosecutors say Aysal was financially motivated and “planned the murder of his wife first take out personal accident insurance in his name for an amount of 400,000 Turkish liras (approximately $ 57,000) of which he was the sole beneficiary ”.

“He took his seven-month-pregnant wife to Butterfly Valley in Fethiye, where they were supposed to be on vacation. They sat there for about three hours while the defendants waited for a moment when there was no one around “to throw him into the void, the indictment said, according to Turkish media. Wall.

Shortly thereafter, the man attempted to purchase insurance, but the bank refused due to the ongoing investigation into his wife’s death.

In an interview, the victim’s brother, Naim Yolcu, said that when they went to the Institute of Forensic Medicine to retrieve the body with Hakan, the man “It didn’t even sound sad”.

// Police officer disguised himself as a doctor to see his father hospitalized with COVID-19 and found him dead

According to Yolcu, after the death, the family learned that Hakan had taken three credits on behalf of his wife, supposedly for doing extreme sports like skydiving. This caught their attention because they knew the woman was against borrowing and the man did not like heights.

The Fethiye High Criminal Court ultimately ruled that Hakan should remain in pre-trial detention for the premeditated murder of his pregnant wife.

According to the Turkish organization Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız (“Let’s stop femicide), there has been 300 femicides in Turkey in 2020 and 170 other suspicious deaths of women. In most cases, the killers were husbands, partners or ex-partners.