ISRAEL KILLED MORE THAN NINE; BODIES THROWN INTO THE SEA

Planes carrying 520 aid volunteers and nine dead bodies of activists killed by Israeli security forces on Monday returned home on Thursday, with many claiming mistreatment at the hands of Israeli military officers and other officials and additional allegations that not everyone has returned.

Turkey’s Council of Forensic Medicine completed examining some of the bodies. The findings have not yet been announced. It will be a few weeks before the experts get back all the results, but initial statements from doctors confirm Yıldırım’s account of the shootings at close range.

According to İHH official Ömer Yağmur, who spoke to the doctors, 19-year-old Furkan Doğan was killed by four bullets to the head ~ all fired at close range ~ and one bullet into his chest, also fired at close range. He said Doğan was studying at a private high school in Kayseri and hoped to become a doctor in the future.

The council also confirmed yesterday that eight of the nine bodies brought back from Israel belong to Turkish citizens. The ninth person was identified as a US citizen of Turkish origin.

More than 500 activists who were brought to Turkey were examined on Thursday by 120 forensic medicine experts and their assistants.

People thrown into the sea

Activist İdris Şimşek, who also arrived on Thursday, claims that four wounded activists were thrown into the sea. Şimşek also stated that there was immense psychological pressure on the activists.

Şimşek said they expected some harassment but had no inkling of what would happen, noting that they were not expecting an armed attack. He also mentioned that there were no weapons, including a small Swiss army knife that some foreign press organs claimed was on the ship.

He stated, as many other activists have,

that the person who was waving a white flag

to surrender was shot by soldiers.

He said that he saw many people lying in puddles of blood after the soldiers opened fire.

Erol Demir, another activist on the Mavi Marmara, said they had footage of the chaos and the carnage on the ship, emphasizing that the footage will show the real face of Israeli solders to the entire world.

“They even shot those who surrendered. Many of our friends saw this. They told me that there were handcuffed people who were shot.”

All activists stated that Israeli helicopters sprayed cold seawater onto the ship for three hours.

(This is a common tactic used on the fishermen of Gaza by the IOF)

Hakan Albayrak, a journalist from the Yeni Şafak daily who was also on the ship, said:

“It was an outright massacre what Israel did out there. They attacked us in international waters. We protected our ship. We had no weapons. I think we lost more people.”

Activist Özlem Şahin Ermiş said 60 soldiers took her hostage. The prisoners were harassed by violent attack dogs and some were badly bitten. She also noted that they were not fed any food or given anything to drink during their initial interrogation on the ship.

The İHH said the activists Çelebi Bozan, Osman Kurç and Aydın Ataç were definitely still missing. These individuals might still be in a hospital in Israel, İHH officials said.

Meanwhile, the full list of the names of the nine Turks whose corpses were sent to Turkey and their hometowns were announced as İbrahim Bilgen ~ Siirt, Ali Haydar Bengi ~ Diyarbakır, Cevdet Kılıçlar ~ İstanbul (İHH staff), Çetin Topçuoğlu ~ Adana (national taekwondo team member), Necdet Yıldırım ~ Malatya (İHH staff), Furkan Doğan ~ Kayseri, Fahri Yaldız ~ Adıyaman, Cengiz Songür ~ İzmir and Cengiz Akyüz ~ Hatay. Doğan was only 19. He was killed with four bullets to the head and one to the chest.

Ahmet Aydan Beker from Kayseri (critically injured), Mehmet Ali Zeybek of Diyarbakır (critically wounded and under arrest) and Uğur Süleyman Söylemez from İstanbul are being treated in Israeli hospitals.

The head of Turkish charity the İHH, which organized the humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza, said Israeli commandos shot an Indonesian doctor in the stomach and a photographer in the forehead

‘They poisoned our food,’ claims Gaza activist

İbrahim Musaji, a 26-year-old activist from England who was also on the Mavi Marmara, was asleep during the raid. He says he rushed to the deck immediately after being woken up by gunfire to see his friends lying in a pool of blood. He said the soldiers threatened to kill him if he attempted to help them. “They hate people, all they want was to shed Muslim blood.” He also claimed that there was poison in the food fed to prisoners.

Recai Kaya, a representative of the Enderun Association, said one of the activists on the ship was shot by a soldier when they were returning one of the injured Israeli soldiers to the raiding force.

Kaya said he was hit with a rifle butt when he tried to help an older man, who could not pull his pants back up after using the bathroom because he was handcuffed. “He was so embarrassed.” İstanbul Today’s Zaman