CPJ believes that Cansever may have been prosecuted and imprisoned as a result of his affiliation with Devrimci Çözüm. He was taken into custody in Istanbul and subsequently charged under Article 168/2 of the Penal Code with membership in the outlawed organization Dev Sol.
The Ministry of Justice informed CPJ that “Mr. Bektas Cansever, whose alias was Yusuf Yilmaz, was taken into custody on December 26, 1993. During a physical body search, police found an unauthorized pistol on Mr. Cansever. Like the CPJ states, it was also found that Mr. Cansever was also a member of Dev Sol, an outlawed leftist organization categorized as such in the annual U.S. State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report.”
Prosecution documents show that Cansever was accused of hanging banners in public, throwing Molotov cocktails in Izmir in 1991, and other Molotov cocktail incidents. The prosecution claimed that Dev Sol had sent Cansever to Istanbul in 1992 in order to elude capture, and that he then began working for Devrimici Çözüm. The state alleged that at the time of his arrest, police found in his possession a gun, two counterfeit I.D.s, and a handwritten document outlining Dev Sol’s organizational structure. Three people were said to have made statements incriminating him—but there was no record of their statements in the court documents.
According to court documents, Cansever admitted throwing a Molotov cocktail in Istanbul.
Cansever was convicted on April 10, 1997, and sentenced to more than 24 years in jail. He is in Gebze Prison.