Nine activists were shot 30 times, autopsy shows
The nine men killed during an Israeli navy raid on a ship carrying aid to Gaza were shot a total of 30 times, the head of the state forensics laboratory said on Saturday.
Most of the victims, who were all Turkish, were shot at close range with what may have been pistols, Haluk İnce, chair of the Council of Forensic Medicine (ATK), told Reuters. “The deaths of all nine were caused by bullets from firearms,” he said. “One body had two bullets in the arm, one in the back and one in the knee. In another, there was only one bullet: right in the center of his brow.” Two of the men were shot five times, while one was hit six times, according to the autopsies performed by the forensics lab.
Five people were shot in the head, İnce said. He declined to name which victims were shot how many times. Witnesses have described scenes of chaos when Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara, a ship that was part of a six-vessel convoy carrying hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists who planned to break a three-year blockade on Gaza.
Abid Mahi, 30, a British volunteer on the Mavi Marmara, told Reuters he heard something whizz past his right ear from behind and, an instant later, saw a man in front of him collapse and, Mahi believes, die. “It wasn’t a raid, it was an attack,” he said.
Israel has said its soldiers were acting in self-defense once they intercepted the ship and passengers on the Mavi Marmara attacked them, posing a threat to their lives.
Besides those killed, 24 people are being treated in a hospital in the capital Ankara. Seven are in critical condition, according to physicians.Britain’s Guardian newspaper also reported on the autopsy results carried out by the ATK, stressing that results showed that a 61-year-old man, İbrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, Furkan Doğan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less than 45 centimeters away, in the face, the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back, the Guardian reported.
None of the wounds İnce and his team examined were caused by ricocheting bullets but were all direct hits. All but one of the bullets recovered by examiners were of a 9 mm caliber, İnce said. “The bullets we obtained from the bodies are generally used in short-barreled guns,” İnce said.
Examiners were unable to identify one bullet in available information on firearms. “Normally all weapons are in the record, but we researched this and couldn’t find it in our literature,” İnce said.
“When we opened the skull and reached the brain, we saw this [object] for the first time,” he said. “I have been in forensics for 20 years and have never seen something like this.”
This bullet caused a wound that looked like those caused by projectiles from hunting rifles, İnce said. “He had a circular entrance wound on his right temple with a diameter of about 2-2.5 centimeters,” he added. Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said in an editorial in The New York Times that spent cartridges of a caliber not used by Israeli special forces were found on the Mavi Marmara. The activists said they had no guns on board.
The ATK in İstanbul received the corpses at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday. Israeli authorities had already carried out preliminary examinations of the dead men but had not performed actual autopsies, İnce said.
06 June 2010, Sunday
REUTERS WITH TODAY'S ZAMAN ANKARA