Esat Oktay Yıldıran
Esat Oktay Yıldıran (15 February 1949 – 22 October 1988) was a Turkish military officer who was appointed governor of the Diyarbakır Prison after the 1980 Turkish coup d'état. Yıldıran became famous for his torture of Kurds in Diyarbakır Prison. Many inmates committed suicide or died on hunger strikes. Career. After the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Yıldıran was promoted to binbashi. In 1980, after the military coup which took place the same year, he was sent to the Diyarbakır Prison by Kenan Evren in person. He tortured inmates in the prison with methods were compared to  Nazi methods, and he viewed the prison as a school in which inmates would be subjected to Turkification. Yıldıran beat, coerced and tortured the male and female prisoners. Under his force, inmates were forced to eat human excrement, doused in sewer water, tortured with electric shocks, raped with batons, among others. Yıldıran had a German shepherd called "Co" ("Joe"), which was trained to bite the genitals of naked prisoners; all inmates were obligated to salute the dog. Assassination. On 22 October 1988, Yıldıran was shot dead on a public bus in Ümraniye, Istanbul. According to some reports, his assassin yelled  Laz Kemal sends greetings (referring to one of the inmates) before shooting him. He died in front of his wife and two children. On the 26 October he was buried and declared a shahid by the government. Aftermath. Yıldıran's torture methods were the subject of the Turkish television series “Bu Kalp Seni Unutur mu?” Various books have also been written about Yıldıran's torture practices. One of the most famous books is Mehdi Zana's "Hell No. 5. Diary from a Turkish Prison". Yıldıran was honored as a hero and martyr by Turkish nationalists. In 2010 the Fatih City  Council removed his name from a memorial. In 2013, a Turkish court sentenced the journalist Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı to a suspended prison term of ten months and fined him for writing that Yildirim was a torturer.