Anger as woman’s headless body found in Istanbul bin

FILE- Hagia Sophia dominates Istanbul's skyline, with the Golden Horn in the foreground, Monday, April 12, 2021.

The decapitated body of a woman, whose legs were also cut off, was found in a rubbish bin in Istanbul overnight, Turkish media reported Sunday, sparking fury from women’s groups.

Her body was wrapped in a sheet and dumped in a rubbish container in the Sisli district, where it was discovered on Saturday evening 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 or her legs, but while reviewing security camera footage, 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 were trying to leave the country, DHA said. They later arrested a third suspect.

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.”

Turkiye does not collate official figures on femicides, leaving the job to women’s organizations 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.