By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
November 15, 2023
The family of an Afghan migrant worker in Turkey has accused his employers of killing him and then burning his body to cover up their crime.
Speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi on November 15, Qamar Gul said her husband, Wazir Mohammad Nourtani, didn’t return from work in Turkey’s western Black Sea province of Zonguldak on November 9.
She said she reported his disappearance to the police on November 10 and “around noon the next day, they informed me that they had found a body.”
“When they showed me the body, it was my husband,” she said.
Nourtani, 50, worked in an illegal coal mine in Zonguldak. He was the sole breadwinner for his family of five.
According to reports in Turkish media, police have arrested six people in connection with his death, including the owners of the illegal mine where he worked.
The suspects, the reports say, have confessed to his murder after he fell unconscious while working. The owners allegedly didn’t take him to the hospital. Instead they killed him in an apparent bid to prevent their illegal mine from being discovered.
Police have not commented officially on the case.
“I want to ask them, why did they kill him?” Gul said, questioning why they didn’t take him to the hospital.
“Why did they set him on fire?” she added. “They broke his arms and legs and smashed his head.”
After living in Iran for two decades, Nourtani moved to neighboring Turkey earlier this year to escape Tehran’s ongoing crackdown on Afghan migrants.
He is not the first Afghan suspected of being killed in the country. There have been several reports of Afghans who entered Turkey from Iran being shot dead.
Turkey, like Iran and Pakistan, has begun to deport a large number of Afghans back to their country, with almost 4,000 leaving in recent weeks. Over the past month, some 400,000 Afghans have been repatriated from those two countries.
Turkey hosts more than 3.2 million registered Syrian refugees. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, it has seen an increasing number of Afghans arriving via Iran.