On Monday, October 11, we shared the info that 128 citizens lost their lives at the Peace Rally Massacre, based on the data from our Crisis Center.
Following the massacre, the difficulties and obstacles involved in collecting info from health institutions and official authorities, especially the Ministry of Health, the difficulties we faced when trying to add up the lists coming from different institutions to our Crisis Center, the existence of those victims we couldn’t hear from, the enumeration system at Legal Medicine, and the situation faced in relation to the physical integrity of the deceased bodies have made it hard to declare the number of lost ones, and it has been realized that there was an error in the numbers we provided. We apologize to the public and our peoples for this mistake.
Our crisis center continues to work on updating the data we have, in constant communication with prosecutor’s office, health institutions, the institutions that organized the rally, and relatives of the missing and wounded victims.
The biggest difficulty we have faced in this matter is that the Ministry of Health does not share the info they have. Beyond this, the chief physicians at hospitals have been definitively ordered not to provide data. We condemn this practice by the Ministry of Health, which prevents the public from exercising their right to information access in such a critical moment.
HDP Press Office
13 October 2015