Turkish Pastor Arrested on Human Trafficking Accusations

A Turkish Protestant pastor arrested by police in the Black Sea province of Samsun this week is accused of involvement in prostitution and the human trafficking of refugees.

Pastor Orhan Picaklar of the Samsun Agape Church was summoned to local police headquarters for questioning on Monday afternoon (November 11).

The 42-year-old pastor was detained until Wednesday evening in a police investigation led by the Morals Bureau of the Public Order Division. The criminal case was reportedly based on a telephoned complaint from an unidentified person.
“It is obviously a deliberate plot,” a spokesperson from the Alliance of Protestant Churches in Turkey told World Watch Monitor, saying that Picaklar had been harassed for years by local media and city authorities who openly opposed the church’s existence.

While in detention with seven other individuals, Picaklar learned they were all being named as suspects in the same “human trafficking operation”.
“I hadn’t ever seen any of them, and none of them knew me either!” Picaklar told World Watch Monitor.

But the Turkish press was quick to trumpet the pastor’s arrest for the next two days, before Picaklar was finally brought to testify before the prosecutor on Wednesday afternoon.
On Tuesday, the national daily Milliyet quoted the alleged statement of a 19-year-old Iranian woman whose legal visa in Turkey had expired. The young woman claimed that Picaklar had proposed a sexual relationship with her, in exchange for rent payments she could not make to the church. When she refused, she said she moved in with another woman, where her passport was confiscated and she was forced into prostitution.

After his release, the pastor confirmed that he knew this woman, who had said she was a Christian and came to study in Samsun. Because she had no place to stay, he had offered her a 25-day stay in facilities the church often loaned to needy refugees on a short-term basis. But when he found her in a compromising situation with a half-clothed male companion about 10 weeks ago, the pastor, accompanied by a police officer, asked her to leave the church facilities immediately.

“Significantly,” Picaklar said, “we have learned that this woman and the others apparently involved in prostitution were deported without ever being brought to police headquarters.”

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