Şirnex (Şırnak)- A delegation travelling to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to retrieve the bodies of murdered Kurdish journalists Nazim Daştan and Cihan Bilgin has been kept waiting at the Khabour border crossing for two days.

The delegation consisting of eight people, including family members of the journalists, Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) Mardin MP Kamuran Tanhan, members of the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association (DFG) and the Lawyers Association for Freedom (ÖHD) and representatives of NGOs has been arbitrarily kept waiting at the border crossing for 43 hours.

‘An arbitrary decision is implemented’

“There is no problem in entry and exit at the border crossing but the border crossing is closed only for us, a group of eight,” DEM Party Mardin MP Kamuran Tanhan said, calling the practice an “arbitrary decision”. “On the first day, at around 3 AM, a person, who introduced himself as deputy police chief of the district, invited us to the city to rest there. He told us ‘You are tired; this place is not suitable for you to stay. You can return in the morning. You will be the first to cross the border in the morning.’ We did not accept his invitation because we did not trust him. We believe that they aim to take us out of this area and not allow us to enter the area again. This morning, they attempted to take us out of this area again; they suggested that we should stay in a room assigned to us. We told them that we would stage a sit-in protest if they kept insisting. The right to take possession of a dead body for the purpose of burial has been violated. An arbitrary decision is implemented.”

 ‘We wait for news from Ankara’

The delegation has been kept waiting at the border crossing for more than a day on the grounds of “broken X-ray system”. Over the reactions, the police chief of the district said, “We wait for news from Ankara.”