PROFILE - Mysterious death of Turkish politician marks decade

ANKARA

It has been 10 years since Muhsin Yazicioglu, Turkey's nationalist politician, died in a mysterious helicopter crash.

The founder of the Great Unity Party (BBP) died on March 25, 2009 when a helicopter taking him to a local election rally crashed in a mountain in the southern province of Kahramanmaras.

The cause of the crash in which six people died is still unknown.

He is survived by his wife, Gulefer Yazicioglu, and two children.

Yazicioglu was born on Dec. 31, 1954 in the central province of Sivas.

He studied veterinary medicine at Ankara University and also wrote poems, stepping into politics in 1968 by joining a youth nationalist movement.

In 1972, he came to capital Ankara to join Turkey's nationalist Grey Wolves group, also chairing the movement for sometime.

After the military coup in 1980, Yazicioglu was jailed pending trial for seven-and-a-half years, out of which he spent five-and-a-half year in solitary confinement. He was eventually acquitted.

He started his formal political career as a member of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), currently a Turkish opposition party.

In 1991, he left the MHP and founded the BBP in 1993, which he led with brief intervals until his death.

In July 2007 elections, he was chosen as an independent lawmaker following his resignation from the BBP.

Yazicioglu was a staunch critic of Fetullah Gulen, a now U.S-based terrorist who carried out the 2016 defeated coup bid in Turkey which martyred 251 people and injured 2,200.

His poems and quotes mark the legacy he left behind.

''We are not a nation [Turks] that enjoys spilling blood, but if our motherland is at stake, we will cut the aorta of the world,'' Yazicioglu once said.

His last poem was like a parting message to his family, friends and supporters.

"I am brimming with peace,

Pondering eternity,

Oh, the Owner of eternity,

It is to You I want to reach."