Last Thursday, the 11. March 2021 there was another repression against active members of the Kurdish cultural association in Kassel. The police searched a total of five objects and numerous cars of three suspects. They are accused, To have raised money for the PKK.
The basis for the searches is the allegation of terrorist financing according to §89c StGB. The three are suspected, that emerges from the search warrant, for at least 2019. Specifically, it says there, they had organized the collection of donations for the PKK in Kassel. This is mainly based on tapped phone calls from another procedure.
In addition to private notes, laptops in particular were confiscated during the searches, Cell phones, Hard drives and other electronic storage media. The police also took items with them, the relatives of the accused belong, including the laptop of a suspect's daughter. In addition to the laptop, she now also lacks all the material for her master's thesis, that she's actually currently writing, tells Mazlum Bavli, one of the accused. When will the confiscated items be returned by the police, is so far unclear.
Bavli works in the family-owned company, which produces advertising material. There, the police would not only have the company cell phone during the search, but also the work computer and a hard drive with all customer data. That is the biggest problem right now, he says.
“The Corona time was hard enough. Then things slowly went up in terms of orders and now everything is gone. How do they introduce themselves?, that our family should keep working?”
Mazlum Bavli, one of the accused
His lawyer had requested, that the items necessary for the work are returned as soon as possible. How long the whole procedure still takes, he could not estimate.
Specifically, the public prosecutor in Frankfurt am Main throws, who conducts the proceedings, Bavli vor, to have taken care of the sale of “tickets” and thereby raised donations for the PKK. Probably someone said in one of the tapped calls, you can contact him for bus tickets or entrance tickets, accepts Bavli. That the Kurdish cultural association also organizes cultural events or coordinates travel by bus to larger demonstrations, however, is not a secret.
Rather, it shows, he criticizes, that the PKK ban is used, criminalize any form of political and cultural activism by Kurds in Germany. These include the latest house searches and several ongoing proceedings against Kurdish activists as well as the telephone calls that had apparently been tapped for years.