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A family yearns for answers years after Turkish refugee’s torture, death

In 2022, the Turkish coastguard found Baris Buyuksu barely alive with signs of torture, in the Aegean Sea.

Athens, Greece – As noted in his autopsy, 30-year-old Baris Buyuksu had several tattoos.

On the inside of his left arm was the invocation, “be patient”, in Turkish. On the outside of his left hand, the Turkish word for “hope”.

Hope is a word that aptly described him, his sister Dilan Biyik told Al Jazeera. He was also optimistic.

Although he found it challenging to find stable work in Turkey, Buyuksu, a Turkish citizen of Kurdish descent, was always looking forward. He spoke frequently about trying to build a future for himself outside of the country.

“He wanted to settle in Europe and build a new life there. He wanted to get a residence permit and live there,” Biyik told Al Jazeera.

On September 27, 2022, he made a surprise video call to his family from the Greek island of Kos, an idyllic tourist hotspot home to about 40,000 people. He had made it to Europe without being intercepted by the Greek coastguard.

“We didn’t know he was going that day,” said his sister.

She spoke to her brother frequently via video call while he was on Kos. He stayed there for 23 days, spending time with a childhood friend, Ali Safak Polat.

“He called us almost every day. We were worried,” she said.

But he remained positive, smiling broadly in calls from Kos’s main town.

“He kept telling us that everything was going to be fine.”

On October 20, Buyuksu told his sister he was going to take a ferry to Athens.

But the next day, Polat called Biyik and said her brother never made it onto the ferry to Athens. He was apprehended by Greek police and loaded into a black van in the port, Polat said. Neither heard from Buyuksu again.

Soon after, the Mugla police station in eastern Turkey called, asking Buyuksu’s relatives to identify his body.

The Turkish coastguard had found him barely alive in an inflatable life raft, adrift about three miles southwest of the Turkish city of Bodrum.

Underneath his tattoos, bruises swelled and spanned to his neck, back and face.

The life raft was packed with 15 other people, all Palestinian refugees. Several in the group had similar bruises and wounds. One had a broken arm. Buyuksu died before they made it to Turkish shores.

Lawyers in Greece and Turkey and the Bodrum Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office allege that Buyuksu was illegally pushed back from Kos. They say he was another victim of violent and illegal expulsions occurring on Europe’s borders.

Biyik also blames Greece and calls her brother’s death a “murder”.

“Every refugee who ‘violates’ the borders is a criminal in their eyes and they think they have the right to do anything to them,” she said. “They kill people in a very cold way and throw them into the Aegean Sea. There is no more space in the cemeteries in our country where the bodies of unidentified refugees are buried.”

Greece maintains that it does not engage in illegal pushbacks along its borders. However, the practice has been documented many times via testimony, video and geolocation. It has been decried by human rights groups, the Council of Europe, the International Organization for Migration, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, and the UNHCR.

The Turkish coastguard reported that Buyuksu was declared dead at about 5:20 in the morning.

The Hellenic Coast Guard did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment on the allegations.

The Palestinians who were on the life raft with Buyuksu later told Turkish authorities that upon their arrival on Kos, they were gathered up by people they identified as “Greek soldiers” and held. They said they were stripped naked, robbed of their phones and valuables, and beaten for hours. They said they heard someone screaming in Turkish in an adjacent room.

Al Jazeera has reviewed leaked documents from the Bodrum Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office that carried troubling statements by the Palestinian refugees.

“From what we heard, they were using violence and beating this person. The sounds of the Turkish citizen suffering and screaming were coming to the room we were in. Additionally as far as I could understand from the sounds, the [Turkish citizen] was being tortured by electrocution,” one said. “I could hear the sounds of the device used to deliver electricity. They continued the torture through the night.”

The Palestinians said in the early hours of the morning, they were taken to the sea, along with Buyuksu. They state they were forcibly boarded onto a Hellenic Coast Guard boat. At sea, they watched the coastguard inflate a life raft. All 16 people were tossed one by one onto the raft, and left abandoned in the Aegean, they said.

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