Anger as woman’s headless body found in Istanbul rubbish bin

INSTANBUL – The decapitated body of a woman, whose legs were also cut off, was found in a rubbish bin in Istanbul overnight, Turkish media reported on Jan 25, sparking outrage from women’s groups.

Her body, wrapped in a sheet, was dumped in a rubbish container in the Sisli district and discovered on the evening of Jan 24 by a paper collector looking for items to recycle, the DHA News Agency said.

Investigators identified the victim as a 37-year-old Uzbek national.

They were not immediately able to find the victim’s head and legs. But while reviewing security camera footage, the authorities spotted two men dumping a suitcase at a different bin. It was not immediately clear what it contained.

Hours later, police detained two suspects, also Uzbek nationals, at Istanbul Airport as they attempted to leave the country, DHA reported. A third suspect was later arrested.

Women’s rights groups expressed outrage, calling for demonstrators to join two protest marches in Istanbul and Ankara.

Large crowds met at Osmanbey metro station in Sisli, carrying banners and placards reading “Stop male violence!”, “We demand justice for women who are murdered” and “Migrant women are not alone”, NGO footage showed.

“Women will no longer be silent!” chanted the crowd as they marched to the place where the woman’s body was found, their numbers estimated to be over a thousand.

‘Confident in their immunity’

In Ankara, hundreds more marched at a protest called by the Stop Femicides platform, which demanded accountability for the woman murdered in Sisli.

“The perpetrators were so confident nothing would happen to them that they could just leave the body of the woman they killed in a bin in plain view,” Isil Kurt of Stop Femicides said in a statement.

“Even though years pass and cities and names change, violence against women remains the same.”

Turkey does not collate official figures on femicides, leaving the job to women’s organisations which collect data on murders and other suspicious deaths from press reports.

Figures compiled by Stop Femicides show that in 2025, 294 women were killed by men and 297 women were found dead under suspicious circumstances.

Sisli’s jailed mayor Resul Emrah Sahan, who was arrested around the same time as Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu in a crackdown widely seen as politically motivated, said such murders were a “major social problem”.

“Femicides are turning into an ever-growing massacre through impunity, negligence, and silence,” he wrote on X, demanding coordinated action to tackle the issue. AFP