Sat 14 March 2020:
Three members of the human trafficking ring whose activities led to the death of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, in a case that made headlines worldwide, were each sentenced to 125 years in prison by a Turkish criminal court on Friday.
The 2015 death of 3-year-old Kurdi, as well as five other refugees who shared his boat in the Aegean, shocked the international community and came to symbolize the plight and desperation of Syrian refugees.
The traffickers had evaded arrest until their capture by Turkish security forces this week in the southern province of Adana.
The lifeless body of Kurdi – one of 14 Syrian refugees, including eight children, who took a boat on the Aegean to reach the Greek islands – washed up on a beach near the Turkish resort town of Bodrum, in the southwestern province of Muğla.
A number of Syrian and Turkish defendants were found to be responsible for the accident and all received prison terms. However, the three defendants sentenced Friday had fled during the trial. The identities of the defendants have been determined as Cebrail Enkadur, Ecevit Bülent Gökalp and Ali Can Şaş.
Bodrum High Criminal Court in Muğla sentenced the defendants for the crime of “killing with eventual intent.” The traffickers received a collective total of 546 years in prison.
Back in 2015, the father of Kurdi, Abdullah Kurdi, paid smugglers to take him and his family from Turkey to Greece after the Turkish government would not grant them the exit visas needed to enter Canada, where their relatives were living as refugees.
However, their September 2015 journey across the Aegean ended in tragedy after the flimsy inflatable boat sank in rough seas.
Eleven refugees died, including Kurdi’s wife Rehanna and their two young boys, Ghalib and Alan — or Aylan as his name was widely transcribed in the anglophone press at the time.
The images of Aylan – wearing a red T-shirt, blue shorts and black shoes, and lying face-down in the surf – sparked outcry around the world and led to demands that more should be done to protect those making the perilous journey from Western Asia and North Africa to Europe.
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