Family: Body of Palestinian who Died in Turkish Prison Badly Mutilated

The family of a Palestinian who Turkish authorities claim committed suicide in prison said the man’s body was badly mutilated. Relatives of Zaki Mubarak – jailed over accusations that he spied for the United Arab Emirates – have transferred his body to Egypt. Mubarak’s brother told Arab media from Cairo that the family was waiting to bring the remains back to the Gaza Strip until “we get a doctor’s report showing he died due to torture.” He added that Zaki’s “tongue was removed and there were the effects of blows to the head, a deep cut in his foot and the impact of strikes to his chest.” In response, a Turkish Justice Ministry official called the allegations “baseless” but declined to provide further details. Mubarak, a former Palestinian intelligence officer, left Gaza in 2007 after Hamas ousted Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction from the enclave in a bitter internecine war. Ankara reportedly was investigating whether Mubarak, along with former top-ranking Palestinian official Mohammad Dahlan, who lives in exile in Abu Dhabi, were involved in last October’s murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul.