ANKARA (Middle East Eye) – Turkish human rights groups have said that three Syrian factory workers have brutally been murdered in Izmir by a suspect motivated by racism and xenophobia.
Led by the Izmir branch of Human Rights Association, 14 rights defender groups said that on an early morning in November, an unnamed Turkish citizen poured gasoline into a room in a stone factory complex where Mamoun al-Nabhan, 23, Ahmed al-Ali, 21, and Mohammed al-Bish, 17, had been sleeping and set it ablaze.
Other factory workers immediately tried to help the victims after hearing their calls for help. However, the Syrian workers succumbed to their wounds a week later at a local hospital, according to the statement.
“The police initially ruled out the incident as triggered by a malfunctioning heater. However, the locals reported to the police that the suspect told them that he was going to kill the said Syrians, which led to an investigation,” the human rights groups said.
“He was caught after trying to stab two other people and confessed in his testimony that he had indeed burned the Syrians to death.”
A report by the local Ilkses paper said that in his testimony, the suspect said that he used to work at the same stone factory where the Syrians had been employed, but after their arrival, the factory stopped contracting him for jobs at the plant.
In recent months, opposition leaders in Turkey have increasingly weaponized the subject of refugees, vowing to prevent neighborhoods from being “taken over” by Syrians, and pledging to send refugees back to their countries of origin.
Turkey currently hosts 5.2 million migrants, of which 3.7 million are Syrian refugees, according to a statement by the Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu in November.