Vedat Aydın

Vedat Aydın (19537July 1991) was a Kurdish politician in Turkey and human rights defender. He was married to Sükran Aydın.

Early life and education He was born in 1953 in the village of Kazancı in Bismil District of Diyarbakir Province. He graduated from the Literary department of the Vocational School in Diyarbakir in 1979.

Kurdish rights activist At the annual meeting of the IHD in October 1990, he gave the first public speech in Kurdish language in Turkey, which was forbidden. Many other non-Kurdish delegates left the congress in protest while Aydin kept on with his speech, which was translated by Ahmet Zeki Okçuoglu into Turkish. He was immediately buried at the Maden Municipality, but later an autopsy was done and after it was confirmed the body belonged to Aydın, he was reburied in Diyarbakir. His skull was fractured, his legs broken and about 15 bullets were shot in his body. 8 bullets were found in his body. No one was charged for the murder of Vedat Aydin. At his funeral in Diyarbakir on 10 July, the police fired live ammunition into a crowd of thousands of mourning people. The police claimed stones were thrown from within the crowd, eyewitnesses denied this, though. As a result, 7 and up to 100 people were injured. Protests against these events took place in the next days Diyarbakir, Nusaybin, Lice, Uludere and Bismil. Nobody was charged with the killing of the attendants of the funeral cortege. On 4 December 1993 a delegation of DEP parliamentarians came under an armed attack as they were on a mission in Batman trying to find out who killed Aydın. As a result, the MP for Mardin Mehmet Sincar and the local party leader of Batman were killed and MP for Batman Nizamettin Toğuç was injured together with three others. The investigation into the murder of Vedat Aydın went on, but in the year 2009, 18 years after his murder, a court in Malatya decided to close the investigation about the murder of Aydin and returned the file to Diyarbakir due to lack of jurisdiction.