By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Tuesday ruled that a Turkish author and her son can be extradited to Turkey to face charges that he caused a reckless, fatal car crash in Istanbul and then fled the country with the help of his mother.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Donald Cabell in Boston rejected arguments that Turkish novelist and poet Eylem Tok and her 17-year-old son, Timur Cihantimur, had not been charged with extraditable offenses, clearing the way for the U.S. State Department to consider turning them over.
Further litigation is likely and could delay their extradition, which Turkey has been pursuing since their arrest in June as the mother and son were about to tour a private school in Boston.
David Russcol, Tok’s lawyer, said her attorneys were evaluating their options for further judicial review. Her son’s lawyer, Martin Weinberg, said the ruling raised important issues concerning whether the juvenile could be extradited despite a lack of a formal criminal charge.
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment. The Turkish Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to prosecutors, the teenager was driving a Porsche on the night of March 1 when, while speeding around a corner, he crashed into a group of people on all-terrain vehicles. One person, Oguz Murat Aci, died and four others were injured.
Prosecutors said the teenager immediately fled the scene after saying something like “my life is over.” He was picked up by the family’s driver, and within hours Tok had purchased one-way plane tickets for them to fly to Cairo, Egypt. They then continued on to the United States.
Their lawyers argued the teenager could not be extradited for the crime of causing reckless killing and injury because the U.S.-Turkey extradition treaty only covered individuals who are formally charged, while he was only facing an arrest warrant.
They also argued that Tok’s alleged offenses of concealing a cellphone that authorities viewed as evidence and protecting an offender by helping her son flee were not extraditable under that treaty.
Cabell rejected those arguments. With regard to Tok’s son, he said it was clear that the term “charged” in the treaty did not mean a formal charge. “Rather, construed in the generic and more elastic sense, it is synonymous with accused,” he said.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Bill Berkrot)
