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| - A long-awaited trial opened Wednesday of three police officers for the 2015 killing of a prominent rights lawyer in Diyarbakir, Turkey's biggest Kurdish-majority city. Tahir Elci, who campaigned for Kurdish rights, was shot in the head in broad daylight on November 28, 2015, during armed clashes between Kurdish militants and police. He was head of Diyarbakir's bar association at the time. The three police officers are accused of "causing death by foreseeable negligence" and face between two to six years in prison if convicted. Elci's wife, Turkan Elci, told the court she had been "waiting for five years" for justice. "If you give me two minutes of your time to listen to my feelings, you will probably change your decision. Until I came here, I had faith in you, in justice," she added. Dozens of lawyers and representatives of human rights groups also attended the trial. During the court proceedings there was a standoff between some of the lawyers and a judge who ordered their removal for "disrupting" the hearing. The lawyers refused to leave. The trial was postponed to March 3, 2021 to consider the Elci family lawyers' request for the recusal of the judges. The lawyers had asked the judges to require the police defendants to come to court, a request which was rejected. A higher court will decide whether the trial judges should be removed. The police officers took part in the trial, which began under heavy security in Diyarbakir, via videoconference. A fourth individual described as a Kurdish militant is also being tried in absentia on the same charge as the officers, as well as over the killing of two police officers before Elci was shot and "destroying the country's unity and integrity". The militant, who had been on the same street as Elci when the lawyer was killed, faces life in jail if found guilty. Elci's death came after a two-and-a-half year ceasefire collapsed in 2015 between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is blacklisted as a terrorist group by Ankara and its Western allies. Two PKK militants shot two police officers dead in a street near to where Elci died just minutes after he called for peace in the restive southeast. Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticised the "extreme delays" in the case and the "huge obstacles to securing an effective investigation". The rights group noted the prosecutor investigating the death was replaced several times and authorities failed to collect evidence at the site of the shooting. One of the lawyers present at the hearing, Baris Yavuz, criticised the judges. "They reject all our requests, they don't listen to any of them properly. "There is an attitude of 'let me get rid of this as soon as possible'," Yavuz fumed. Investigators from the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture last year published an in-depth report into the shooting indicating that security forces could have killed Elci. "It will be very important for the Diyarbakir court to take full note of the study's findings and carefully examine whether the prosecutor's charges against the police are commensurate with the gravity of the crime," Tom Porteous, HRW deputy programme director, said in a statement. mb-raz/fo/pvh
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