‘You’re going to kill somebody,’ friends wrote in yearbook of Turkish ‘serial killer’

ANKARA

New details are continuing to surface about a suspected serial killer who has returned to Turkey, as statements written by the man’s friends in his high school yearbook were revealed on June 1.A friend of the suspect, Atalay Filiz, wrote that he would kill a person, while others used words such as “pervert,” “animal,” “weird,” “maniac” and “abnormal” to describe him in the yearbook from Istanbul’s Galatasaray high school published in 2006, daily Habertürk reported.“You are the most weird and most abnormal friend that I have,” wrote one of his friends, while another one said that Filiz enjoyed spreading people’s “dirty laundry.”“Everyone has dirty laundry and you derive a perverted pleasure from spreading them. Even though some of your characteristics scare me, you are a beautiful person. I have no doubt that you will continue to terrify me in the future,” his friend wrote.“I’ve learnt a lot from you. For instance I can look at foreign girls like animals,” wrote another friend.Two photos were also included in the yearbook, one of which was taken in front of a TV showing the character Hannibal Lecter from “The Silence of the Lambs.”After three years on the run, Filiz reappeared in Turkey as the prime suspect in the murder of a 40-year-old teacher in Istanbul’s Tuzla district. Being sought internationally with a red notice for the alleged murder of two people, including a Russian woman, the man is enrolled at a top PhD program and is fluent in four languages.The return of the suspected killer came to light when the neighbors of a history teacher, Fatma Kayıkçı, reported hearing cries from Kayıkçı’s apartment in the Postane neighborhood of Tuzla on May 27.Local police launched an investigation, as Kayıkçı was reported missing after the unknown quarrel, and found a pair of the woman’s shoes alongside stains of her blood at the apartment of one of her neighbors residing on the ground floor.An investigation into the suspected neighbor’s identity revealed that the man, who introduced himself as Furkan Altın, was in fact named Atalay Filiz and was being sought for the murder of two people. Meanwhile, the police also managed to find Kayıkçı’s body on May 28, buried beneath a tree in a nearby uncultivated plot of land.According to reports, Filiz was being sought internationally with a red notice for the murder of Göktuğ Demiraraslan, the son of Maj. Gen. Hasan Hüseyin Demirarslan, and his Russian girlfriend Elena Radchikova on Sept. 16, 2013.Meanwhile, Filiz’s former girlfriend, also a Russian national and friends with Radchikova, a woman named Olga Seregina, has also been missing since 2013 and reports indicated she might also have been one of the suspected killer’s victims.