2026 Kahramanmaraş school attack

The Kahramanmaraş school attack was a shooting that took place on 15 April 2026 at Ayser Çalık Ortaokulu, a middle school in the Haydarbey neighbourhood of Onikişubat district, Kahramanmaraş Province, southern Turkey. A 14-year-old boy, İsa Aras Mersinli, who was an eighth-grade student at the same school, entered the building with five 9mm pistols and seven magazines and opened fire in two classrooms. One teacher — mathematics teacher Ayla Kara, 55 — and nine students were killed; a number of injured people were taken to hospital. The attack ended with the death of the attacker himself.

The incident came 28 hours after another school attack, on 14 April 2026, in the Siverek district of Şanlıurfa Province, where a 19-year-old man, Ömer Ket, wounded 16 people with a shotgun and then shot himself. The two incidents within a single week turned school security in Turkey into both a domestic and an international topic. Media reports and the available records indicate that the Onikişubat attack was the deadliest school shooting in Turkish history, with the previous such incident being the 2018 attack at Osmangazi University in Eskişehir.

Course of the attack

According to provincial governor Mükerrem Ünlüer and media sources, the attacker arrived at the school around the time the morning shift students were leaving; he himself was an afternoon shift student. He opened fire indiscriminately in two classrooms, after which a member of the school staff and a parent identified as Necmettin Bekçi attempted to stop him. The weapons used were licensed pistols belonging to his father, a police officer; this prompted extensive debate about how firearms are stored at home.

Investigation and reporting ban

The Kahramanmaraş Chief Public Prosecutor's Office opened an urgent investigation, assigning a team of prosecutors along with police and administrative inspectors. House searches secured the attacker's digital devices, and a document dated 11 April 2026 was found on his computer stating that he would carry out a "major act". The prosecutor's office announced that initial findings pointed to an individual act with no terrorist connection. The 2nd Kahramanmaraş Peace Court imposed a reporting ban (yayın yasağı) on the incident, and RTÜK notified broadcasters to avoid footage of the attack and material violating the dignity of the victims.

Case against the parents

Both the attacker's father and mother were arrested after the incident. The father, Uğur Mersinli, was held in pre-trial detention; the mother, recorded as Peyman Pınar Mersinli (some media wrote Pınar Peyman), was initially released and then arrested on 22 April on charges of "causing death by negligence". Prosecutors said the school counselling service had repeatedly recommended that the boy be taken to a child psychiatric hospital, but that this advice was not acted upon. The investigation concluded on 20 July 2026, and the indictment was accepted by the 3rd Kahramanmaraş Heavy Penal Court: a life sentence was sought for the father and up to 22 and a half years for the mother. The first hearing began on 4 September 2026, and the father told the court that he would file a complaint, accusing his son of stealing the weapons.

Government response and the firearms debate

Schools in Kahramanmaraş were closed for two days, school events were cancelled or postponed, and teachers' unions called a two-day boycott to protest the lack of security at educational facilities. The Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of National Education held a meeting with the 81 provincial governors, after which a security directive was sent to the provinces covering control of school entrances, cameras, visitor procedures, monitoring of the area around schools, and psychological risk assessment of students. Plans were also announced for dedicated security staff at schools and for a risk-analysis system based on artificial intelligence. On 21 April 2026 the Grand National Assembly (TBMM) approved a motion to set up a commission of inquiry into the two attacks and into risks facing children in the digital environment.

The incident revived the debate over private gun ownership in Turkey. Media reports said a draft law was being prepared that would require licensed firearms to be kept in a secure box inaccessible to children, replace existing inspections with more frequent annual checks, and tighten the psychological tests required for a licence. Teachers' unions and some analysts cited high figures for unlicensed weapons and annual firearm deaths, but those figures are advocacy claims without official confirmation.