Turkey: Using The Statute of Limitations To Let AKP And Islamist Supporters Get Away With Murder

This is one reason why there is no statute of limitations on murder in the USA:

Yahoo News: Turkish police fire teargas after controversial court ruling

Turkish police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse hundreds protesting on Tuesday after a court dropped a case against five people charged with killing 37 writers and liberals in a 1993 hotel fire set by Islamist rioters.

The five have never been found and the opposition blamed Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his AK Party, which emerged from a series of banned Islamist parties, for a failure to launch a serious search.

"Some of the killers got married, did their military service, held weddings, sent their children to school, but could not be found," main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu told his parliamentary party. "The AK Party is responsible for the failure to find the perpetrators of the Sivas massacre."

The judge at the Ankara court hearing ruled that the 1993 killings did not amount to crimes against humanity and therefore the statute of limitations applied as more than 15 years had passed
....
"The statute of limitations has always been one of the ways to save the AKP. They always point to the path of the law, then delay it until the statute of limitations," wrote Yalcin Bayar, a columnist for the Hurriyet newspaper. "AKP supporters have saved themselves in many cases with the statute of limitations."

The Supreme Court of Appeals last year upheld life sentences against 25 members of Hizbullah, a Turkish Islamist militant group unrelated to the Lebanese group of the same name, then immediately freed them after ruling the courts had failed to complete the trial process within the allotted time.

Go read the entire article and you'll see how a government can manipulate the system to let its supporters quite literally get away with murder.

Allowing statutes of limitation for murder, particularly political murder is a license to kill for any government that wants to play the game while proclaiming adherence to the rule of law.

In other governmental atrocity news in the region, Syria is busy cracking down on protesters to the shock of the Arab League It's not like the Arab league is any bastion of human rights itself, so when it finally condemns a member for "crimes against humanity" you know they blew it by being too open about how oppressive they are and not getting some wholesale killing done quickly and kept under wraps.

As a side-note to the caption maker of the photo, that's not a tank in the picture, its a BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle, most likely the BMP-1 variant.

Damn journalists think everything with treads is a tank.