Turkish man in London Quran burning case was apparently convicted of wife’s killing

A Turkish man hailed as a champion of free speech in the UK after being cleared of criminal charges over the burning of a copy of the Quran outside his country’s London embassy was previously convicted of killing his wife, according to court documents seen by Middle East Eye.

Hamit Coskun, 51, was sentenced to 16 years in prison by an Istanbul court in 2007 after being found guilty of aggravated homicide over the death of Vesia Coskun in September 2002, according to the Turkish court documents.

Coskun, who is half Kurdish and half Armenian, was released in 2009, having spent nearly seven years in prison following his arrest in 2002.

Although the documents seen by MEE appear to confirm the conviction, Coskun has vehemently denied any involvement, saying his wife died of asthma in a different year and the documents must be forged or refer to someone else.

Lawyers representing Coskun told MEE he denied he had been investigated, arrested, charged or imprisoned over her death, and said he had been in prison in Turkey for many years on charges “arising from his anti-regime politics”.

They said he had “no realistic access to material from his former life in Turkey”.

While there is a well-documented issue with politically motivated prosecutions in Turkey, these are usually brought under blasphemy or terrorism laws.

A lawyer who reviewed the case file at Istanbul’s Bakirkoy criminal court confirmed the contested documents seen by MEE were the same as those held in the court archive.

MEE has confirmed that Coskun's date of birth in the Turkish documents is the same as in British court records.

MEE has also identified a Turkish newspaper report about the case dated 26 September 2002, the same day Coskun was arrested.

Coskun applied for asylum in the UK in 2022. In February 2025 he was arrested after burning a copy of the Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in London. He was charged and convicted on 2 June 2025 with religiously aggravated disorderly behaviour.

The conviction was overturned on appeal in October, and last month the High Court dismissed the Crown Prosecution Service’s bid to challenge Coskun’s acquittal. The CPS told MEE it would not appeal.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph following the judgment, Coskun said the High Court had “struck back against the Islamification of Britain”.

“I am now free to resume my campaign against the rising tide of Islamification, both in Britain and Europe – and that may include burning copies of the Koran again,” he wrote.

Confirmation of Coskun’s acquittal was celebrated by free speech campaign groups, who funded his appeal, and prominent supporters including Robert Jenrick, a former Conservative minister, now with the anti-immigration Reform Party, and leading Conservative MPs Chris Phelp and Nick Timothy, who denounced his prosecution as an attempt to introduce a “blasphemy law” in the UK.

Jenrick, who was pictured leaving court with Coskun following his successful appeal in October, wrote on X: “The right ruling. I stood by Hamit Coskun because, while I don’t agree with burning the Quran, doing so should never be a crime.”

Stephen Evans, the head of the National Secular Society, which co-funded Coskun’s legal case with the Free Speech Union, said the judgment was “an important victory for free expression”.

There is no suggestion that any of those who supported Coskun or welcomed his acquittal in the UK were aware of any previous conviction in Turkey.

Strangled to death

According to the court documents, Coskun stood trial in Istanbul’s Bakirkoy criminal court where he was accused of strangling Vesia Coskun on 25 September 2002.

Coskun is alleged to have killed her “by placing his hands on her throat” in a fight at a house in Istanbul’s Ikitelli district before turning himself in at a police station.

The couple had been married since 1993. Coskun confessed to the killing and expressed remorse, according to the indictment against him.

Coskun was held in prison pending his trial, but was hospitalised a number of times, which delayed trial proceedings, according to the case files reviewed for MEE.

In December 2007 he was sentenced to 16 years in prison, including time already spent in custody.

The indictment against him initially alleged that he was having a relationship with another woman, who was also accused of involvement in the killing. But both Coskun and the woman later retracted their statements and the woman was cleared of all charges.

Coskun was released from Kocaeli Prison on parole conditions on 2 July 2009.

In January 2010, Turkey’s Court of Cassation overturned his conviction due to procedural issues with the trial.

But he was convicted again in May 2011 in a retrial following a complaint brought by Vesia Coskun’s sister. That judgment was upheld by the Court of Cassation in November 2011.

Coskun was not required to serve any further prison time and his parole conditions expired in May 2019.

Writing in the Telegraph, Coskun said he had been arrested and tortured in Turkey after joining a left-wing pro-democracy party in the 1990s and had been released from prison in 2002.

But he said he had been detained again after resuming his political activities in opposition to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party.

The case files reviewed for MEE indicate that Coskun was separately convicted and sentenced to five years in prison by Izmir criminal court over his alleged membership of an illegal armed group, although the documents do not include the date of the conviction.

In a letter sent in response to MEE’s request for comment, Coskun’s lawyers said he had spent many years in prison in Turkey on “charges arising from his anti-regime politics” and was a “target of state and religious authorities”.

They stated he said he had never seen the documents referred to by MEE and believed they may have been forged by politically motivated actors: “His wife died of natural causes. There was no police investigation into it, at least that he knows of. He was never arrested for her murder or charged for it. He was never put on trial for it or jailed for it.”