Ustel’s close personal associate Unal sentenced to five years in prison

Turkish Cypriot ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel’s longtime close personal associate Fatma Unal was on Tuesday sentenced to five years in prison, after having been found guilty on 16 counts of document forgery and other related crimes. Unal’s sentence was handed down in a packed courtroom in Nicosia, with raucous scenes greeting the verdict’s announcement, as members of Unal’s family reacted angrily to the news. Multiple eyewitnesses have since alleged that a bottle filed with water was thrown at the head of newspaper Ozgur Gazete’s editor-in-chief Pinar Barut, with Barut leading a team of journalists and lawyers to the Turkish Cypriot police’s headquarters to file a formal complaint about what they described as “violence” in the courthouse. Unal’s conviction came after it was found that she had obtained a degree from Morphou’s Cyprus Health and Social Sciences University under false pretences, with acting university director Mehmet Altuntas having explained the process through which she obtained her degree during the trial. He explained that Unal was first registered at the university on its online registration database on September 9, 2021. He then said that the following day, Unal’s official date of registration was changed on the database to the spring semester of the same year, and she was then registered to two courses from that semester and given passing grades. The next intervention on the database, he said, occurred on October 28, 2021, when four courses running during the autumn semester of 2021 were selected by Unal herself. Later in the hearing, he explained that on September 22, 2022, Unal’s profile on the database was changed to show that she had taken and passed all the courses required and fulfilled all other requirements to graduate. He said her graduation date was listed as June 15, 2022 – more than three months before the date on which she was registered for the majority of the courses to which she had registered – and that at this point, he contacted the police. Another feature of the trial was repeated references to and allegations levelled against ‘parliament speaker’ Ziya Ozturkler. Following these references, the police in March launched an investigation into allegations that he coerced university officials to award degree certificates to his political allies under false pretences, while then using his position as ‘interior minister’ at the time to award those he coerced citizenship of the ‘TRNC’.