Fırat Sarı is an Istanbul doctor who stands accused of causing the deaths of ten newborn infants. Prosecutors say he led a criminal organization of doctors, nurses, hospital managers and emergency-service staff who, from early 2023, steered newborns into units he ran inside private hospitals in Istanbul and billed the state's Social Security Institution for their care. The indictment charges him with ten counts of intentional killing committed by omission, alongside aggravated fraud, founding an organization to commit crimes and eleven counts of forgery of official documents. If convicted on every count, he faces between 177 years 6 months and 582 years 9 months in prison.
He denies all of it. Since the trial opened before the Bakırköy 22nd Heavy Penal Court in November 2024, he has told the court that he was a trusted physician, that every step followed procedure, that no organization existed and that the infants did not die as the prosecution claims. The case has run through more than a dozen hearings and two merged indictments, lost one of its principal defendants to suicide in custody, and grown from 47 defendants to more than 60. In October 2026 the court ordered that he remain in detention and adjourned the case to January 2027. No verdict has been given, and every allegation against him remains unproven.
Sarı trained at the Trakya University Faculty of Medicine, in Edirne. In a statement taken during the inquiry he said that while he was a medical student he had been convicted of membership of the PKK, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, and had spent about five years in prison before returning to his studies and graduating.
After qualifying he completed his compulsory state service over three years in Kiğı, a district of Bingöl province in eastern Turkey, and then moved to Istanbul, where he worked at a number of hospitals. By 2023 he was a pediatrician attached to a private hospital in the city and the sole owner of Medisense Sağlık Hizmetleri, a health-services company he said he had founded seven or eight years earlier. Through that company he ran the newborn units of several private hospitals in and around Istanbul.
At his first court appearance he told the bench that he earned 400,000 Turkish lira a month. Later in the trial he said that over his career he had looked after between 15,000 and 20,000 patients and that his mortality rate was about one percent.
The prosecution's case is a fraud case with deaths at its center. According to the indictment, members of the group, among them staff of the 112 emergency service, worked to bring newborns into the units the organization operated in private hospitals, where each day of care produced a payment from the Social Security Institution, the state body known as SGK. Prosecutors put the payment at about 8,000 Turkish lira a day. They say reports were falsified to make the infants' conditions appear more serious than they were, so that more money could be drawn from the state and from families, and that the scheme multiplied the units' revenue three or four times. Profits, the indictment says, were shared among members.
Prosecutors place Sarı at the top of the structure. The indictment names him as the founder and leader of the organization, with a second doctor and a 112 emergency-service employee as its managers. The police file sets out a hierarchy that investigators said met the legal elements of a criminal organization.
The ten deaths named in the indictment date from January 2023 onward. The infants have not been publicly identified by the court. The prosecution's view is that the defendants knew the risk their conduct created and let the deaths follow; that is the meaning of the charge of intentional killing by omission, which applies to a person who had a duty to prevent a death and did not act.
The investigation began with a complaint. On March 27, 2023, an anonymous message was sent to CİMER, the Turkish presidency's public communication center. It named a hospital and a doctor and claimed that the doctor was running an organized scheme against the Social Security Institution through newborn care. In the same period, inspectors of the Istanbul Provincial Health Directorate began checks of private hospitals, widened them to other hospitals and earlier cases, and passed what they found to the police. A mother's complaint about her own child's death is also named among the starting points of the inquiry.
On May 21, 2023, the Büyükçekmece Chief Public Prosecutor's Office in Istanbul opened a criminal investigation. A month later, on June 20, 2023, the Financial Crimes Branch of the Istanbul police department began its own work on the file. Investigators gathered evidence over many months, including on the hospitals' handling of health-directorate inspections between September 25 and November 10, 2023, and reviewed roughly 2,400 conversations they considered criminal in content. The provincial health directorate's inspections identified 41 suspects.
The police then moved against the suspects in a single operation, some six or seven months after the financial-crimes work began. By October 2024, 22 defendants, Sarı among them, had been arrested and were held in pretrial detention.
Prosecutors later said the group had threatened the prosecutor in charge of the inquiry with death and that a suspect had been offered $100,000 to have him killed.
The case became public in October 2024, when the indictment and the police file reached the press and set off national outrage. The indictment ran to 1,399 pages. It named 47 defendants, 22 of them in detention, and set out 197 criminal acts. It was sent to the Bakırköy 22nd Heavy Penal Court, which tries serious crimes for the western districts of Istanbul.
For Sarı and the doctor named as his deputy, prosecutors sought prison terms of between 177 years 6 months and 582 years 9 months each, on ten counts of intentional killing by omission, aggravated fraud and founding an organization to commit crimes, and eleven counts of forgery of official documents. For the 112 employee named as the third manager they sought 180 years to 589 years 9 months, on similar charges that also included the unlawful acquisition of personal data. For a further 18 doctors, nurses and staff they sought terms of 10 to 437 years 6 months for intentional killing by omission. Prosecutors also asked the court to close the hospitals and companies involved and to seize their assets.
The government acted before the trial began. The Health Ministry's inspection board had reported on September 28, 2024, and a ministerial approval was signed on September 18. Nine private hospitals in Istanbul received notices canceling their licenses, which barred them from admitting new patients; a tenth was later added. In all, 19 health institutions were found responsible.
In October 2024 the Health Professions Board met and barred 34 of the doctors, nurses and technicians in the case from practicing for three years, the longest ban the provision allowed. By the end of that month investigators were examining some 350 further complaints from families, and prosecutors said that more families might have been affected.
The trial opened on Monday, November 18, 2024, at the Bakırköy courthouse. So many observers came that the session started late. Families of infants who had died filled the courtroom, and protesters outside called for the private hospitals involved to be closed. The court turned down requests to join the case as parties from civil society groups, political parties, bar associations and families of children who had died; the presidents of the Turkish and Istanbul bar associations attended and applied in person.
Sarı denied every charge. Before trial he had told prosecutors that the infants had not been neglected, that the units were neither understaffed nor run by unqualified staff, and that "everything is in accordance with procedures." In court on November 23 he said patients had been referred to him because people trusted him, that no patient had been admitted through bribes paid to the 112 line, and that he wanted to tell everything so that the events could be brought to light. "I love being a doctor very much," he said. He also told the court that he had not invented the scheme; he said he had been asked to take charge of a structure that already existed, a remark that pointed toward the owners of the hospitals.
Other defendants spoke against him. A nurse testified that Sarı hired doctors he knew and was paid from extra bed charges. Another defendant said that a payment Sarı had sent to her bank account was pay for a single shift. Over the first nine days most of the defendants described how the alleged scheme worked, and a number of them acknowledged that they had been paid above the usual rates while denying that they knew where the money came from.
On December 4, 2024, while the first hearing was still in session, the Istanbul financial-crimes police detained 14 more people in a second operation: five doctors, three nurses, five other health workers and one civilian. Two days later a court in Büyükçekmece ordered 11 of them arrested and placed three under judicial control. At the close of the first hearing the trial court kept the 22 detained defendants in custody and adjourned the case to January 13, 2025.
On February 1, 2025, the second doctor named in the indictment as a manager of the organization died by suicide in custody. At the third hearing, which opened on February 18, the court ruled that the case against him had lapsed with his death and refused to let his lawyer speak for him. The number of defendants fell to 46, with 25 in detention.
Sarı used the hearing to attack the coverage of the case. He said the press had denied the defendants a fair trial and that the court should have imposed a publication ban. He called his late co-defendant one of the best pediatricians in Turkey and said the defendants had lost a colleague. Two co-defendants turned on him: one claimed that Sarı had spent months trying to have the late doctor arrested, and the nurse who had testified earlier accused him of putting on a show in court and of misusing patient records. The prosecutor asked that the detained defendants remain in custody.
By April 2025 a second indictment, covering the December 2024 operation, had been merged with the main case, together with a separate 57-page indictment. When the fourth hearing opened on April 21, 2025, 58 defendants were on trial, 30 of them in detention. A hospital chief physician among the new defendants denied the charges and said that Sarı had started work at his hospital three months before him and that Sarı's work permit was official.
Sarı gave his defense on April 25. He said he stood by everything he had said from the beginning, that the indictment rested largely on a few newspaper stories, and that medical practice was more complex than the case allowed. He asked the court to examine the recordings in the file, questioned their accuracy and said they left out relevant information. He also said he did not know the defendant who had threatened the prosecutor. The court adjourned to April 28. At that hearing ten detained defendants were released; the defendant who had threatened the prosecutor had his file separated from the main case.
The fifth hearing opened on June 30, 2025, with 58 defendants on the list and 19 in detention.
In August 2025 the reports of the Forensic Medicine Institute, prepared at the trial court's request, entered the case file. The institute had prepared a separate report on each of the ten deaths, covering the cause of death, whether medical errors had been made and whether the defendants were at fault. For at least one infant the institute found a causal link between improper practice and negligence and the death. The reports named Sarı, his late co-defendant and a third doctor as medically responsible in different respects, and they attributed an organizational failure to the management of one hospital for not overseeing its newborn unit. Sarı rejects the reports. He has said that they were drawn up from two templates, that the infants were never examined after death, and that the findings rest on hypotheses.
The court released three detained nurses under judicial control on September 6, 2025, and adjourned to December 23. By the December sessions the number of defendants had risen to 63, with 13 in detention. Sarı told the court on December 25 that the indictment should never have been accepted: the investigation was incomplete, no permission to investigate the doctors had been obtained, and although officials had visited the hospitals after each death over six months, only one examination after death had been requested. He said the case rested entirely on telephone conversations. "I am being tried on superstitions," he said. On December 27, 2025, the court released a doctor and two nurses under judicial control, ordered the remaining ten detained defendants held, and adjourned to March 24, 2026.
At the interim hearing on March 26, 2026, Sarı appeared in person with three other detained defendants while the rest followed by video link. Ten of the 63 defendants were then in detention. The court kept all of them in custody, lifted judicial control for five others and said it was still waiting for an expert report and a further report from the Forensic Medicine Institute. A hospital chief physician who had been tried without detention had died, and his file was separated, which brought the number of defendants to 62. A nurse sought in both indictments remained at large.
The ninth hearing opened on July 10, 2026, with 62 defendants, ten of them detained, and Sarı again present in person. Defense lawyers spoke for two days. On July 14 the court issued an interim ruling and adjourned to October 12, 2026, to complete outstanding matters.
At the October 2026 session Sarı made a further defense. He denied defrauding the Social Security Institution, denied that the infants had died as the prosecution alleged and denied that any criminal organization had existed. He described the case as a collective effort to damage the government, said he had always argued that Turkey had a good health system, and asked for an independent opinion on the deaths. "I object to the report," he said. On October 14, 2026, the court released two detained doctors, ordered that the other detained defendants, Sarı among them, remain in custody, and adjourned the trial to January 26, 2027. It also ruled that later sessions would be held in a courtroom on a penal-institution campus in Istanbul province.
The central charge in the case, "kasten öldürmenin ihmali davranışla işlenmesi," comes from article 83 of Turkey's Penal Code, Law No. 5237. It covers a death that results from a person's failure to perform an act he was obliged to perform, and it can be brought only against someone who was under a duty to prevent the result. Prosecutors brought it ten times against Sarı, once for each infant named in the indictment, and that is why the sentence sought runs to hundreds of years. Every defendant who faced the charge in the trial was accused of it, not convicted.
The case also ran on two administrative tracks. The license cancellations followed the Private Hospitals Regulation, under which a hospital whose license is canceled may not admit new patients. The three-year professional bans were imposed by the Health Professions Board under article 23(7)(ç) of Decree-Law No. 663. Neither track depends on the outcome of the criminal trial.
Every allegation in the case is unproven. Sarı has denied the fraud, the organization and the prosecution's account of the deaths at every stage, and his lawyers and co-defendants have contested the forensic reports and the evidence from recorded conversations.
The number of deaths is contested. The indictment that went to trial charges ten, and only those ten are before the court. An earlier prosecution document on 21 suspects attributed at least twelve, and an investigative report cited by the state news agency spoke of hundreds of infant deaths over a longer period.
Sarı's earlier PKK conviction rests on his own statement to investigators.
March 27, 2023: An anonymous complaint about a hospital and a doctor is sent to the presidency's CİMER line.
May 21, 2023: The Büyükçekmece Chief Public Prosecutor's Office opens an investigation.
June 20, 2023: The Istanbul police Financial Crimes Branch begins work on the file.
2024: Suspects, Sarı among them, are detained; 22 are held in pretrial detention by October.
September 2024: The Health Ministry's inspection board reports; license cancellations follow.
October 2024: A 1,399-page indictment charges 47 defendants; Sarı is named as leader and charged with ten counts of intentional killing by omission. The Health Professions Board bars 34 defendants from practice for three years.
November 18, 2024: The trial opens before the Bakırköy 22nd Heavy Penal Court.
November 23, 2024: Sarı tells the court he was a trusted physician.
December 4 to 6, 2024: A second police operation; 11 more suspects are arrested.
February 1, 2025: A co-defendant named as a manager of the group dies by suicide in custody; the case against him lapses.
April 21 to 28, 2025: The fourth hearing, with 58 defendants after merged indictments; Sarı gives his defense on April 25.
August 2025: Forensic Medicine Institute reports on the ten deaths enter the case file.
December 25 to 27, 2025: Sarı challenges the indictment; the court keeps ten defendants in detention.
March 26, 2026: Interim ruling; detention continued; 62 defendants remain.
July 10 to 14, 2026: The ninth hearing; adjourned to October 12.
October 14, 2026: Sarı denies all charges again; the court keeps him in detention and adjourns to January 26, 2027.