A preliminary investigation has been launched against Kurdish journalist Dilan Babat from the women’s news agency JinNews over a social media post about the unexplained death of Rojin Kabaiş, a young woman who died in circumstances that have not yet been clarified. The public prosecutor’s office in Van accuses Babat of “publicly disseminating misleading information.”
The journalist was questioned on Thursday at the courthouse in Amed (tr: Diyarbakır). The investigation stems from a post she shared on October 21 about an article titled: “Unverified claim: Are there security forces who have fled abroad?”
According to her lawyer, Babat was asked during questioning, among other things, where she had obtained the information on which she based her assessment that the case would not be investigated, whether she had been informed of a confidentiality order in the case, and whether she assumed that the public prosecutor’s office was not conducting an investigation.
Babat explained that she had explicitly published the information as an unsubstantiated claim: “I made it clear that this was a statement that needed to be investigated. We published the report as a suspicion. At a time when femicides are on the rise, I shared this information, also as a woman. I did not disseminate any misleading content,” she said, according to the statement transcript. The journalist rejected the allegations made against her.
The Rojin Kabaiş case
Rojin Kabaiş was a student at Yüzüncü Yıl University in Van. In October 2024, the 21-year-old was found dead 18 days after her disappearance from a dormitory on the shores of Lake Van. The investigating authorities quickly put forward the theory of suicide—an interpretation that was strongly questioned by her family and their legal counsel from the outset. It is now known that a forensic report contains evidence of possible sexual violence—two male DNA traces were found on sensitive parts of the body.
The circumstances surrounding Rojin’s death, the response of the authorities—information about male DNA traces on Rojin’s body only became known around a year after her death—and the progress of the investigation to date raise many questions from the perspective of human rights organizations and relatives. The IHD speaks of a possible femicide and calls for complete transparency, particularly with regard to the investigation, the medical reports, and the assessments by the public prosecutor’s office.
Rojin Kabaiş’s family is also demanding clarification as to why the rector of the University of Van, Hamdullah Şevli, who sat in the Turkish parliament for several years for the ruling AKP, participated in Rojin Kabaiş’s autopsy without any medical qualifications. The family is also demanding that the confidentiality order on the investigation file be lifted.