Murdered Kurd aimed to quit UK
Sunday, 12 August, 2001
BBC

A murdered asylum seeker reportedly told his family he wanted to leave Scotland just days
before he was stabbed to death. 

According to the Sunday Times Firsat Yildiz, also known as Firsat Dag, told relatives he
was planning to return home because he was tired of being racially abused. 

Mr Yildiz's family told the newspaper that he had been suffering from depression in the
weeks before he was killed near his home in Glasgow's run down Sighthill area. 

The paper quotes his uncle, Mehmet Dag, who lives in his nephew's home town of
Gaziantep, in south-eastern Turkey, as saying: "He said he was fed up and didn't want to
stay. 

"We told him to come home. We asked him: 'What is there to keep you in Britain?' He didn't
come and now he is dead." 

Police are hunting two white men aged between 19 and 21 in connection with the attack on
the 22-year-old Kurd from Turkey. 

He was walking home from a restaurant in Glasgow city centre with a friend when he was
stabbed a week ago. 

On Saturday police released images of a distinctive jacket which was worn by one of the
suspects. 

The man leading the inquiry, Detective Superintendent Alex McAllister has said there was a
"random element" to the attack. 

The policeman said he was keeping an open mind about the case, but he did not rule out a
racial motive for the killing. 

Just two days after Mr Yildiz's death an Iranian asylum seeker, 22-year-old Davoud Rasul
Naseri was stabbed in the back outside his Sighthill flat. 

He was not badly injured, but later spoke out about what he said was the appalling treatment
he had received in Glasgow. 

Another of Mr Yildiz's uncles, Fasih Dag, told the Sunday Times that Firsat opted to stay in
the UK to help his family. 

He said: "Maybe he didn't want to be a burden on me any more and thought that he would
entrust himself to the British government. 

"And now they are going to send him back to us as a corpse." 

Mr Yildiz had only been in Glasgow for two weeks when he was murdered. 
He was said to have moved out of a friend's house in the coastal town of Irvine, North
Ayrshire, because his friend was no longer able to support him. 

He was placed in Sighthill by the government's national asylum support service - at the time
Glasgow was the only Scottish council to have signed up to the scheme to offer help. 

Conflicting reports have claimed variously that Mr Yildiz was a Kurdish nationalist fleeing
persecution by the Turkish government, or a small businessman who arrived in Britain on a
tourist visa to develop his family's fruit and veg company. 

The Sunday Herald newspaper quotes Peri Ibrahim, a leading member of Glasgow's Kurdish
community, as saying claims Mr Yildiz was a bogus asylum seeker were "propaganda"
circulated by the Turkish government. 

He said: "If they paint him as an economic migrant rather than a genuine refugee fleeing
persecution, then they look good and the Kurds look bad." 
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