Turkey Cracks Down on Cyanide Sale After Mass Killings, Suicides

(Bloomberg) -- Turkey’s government is working to curb cyanide sales and plans to establish a system to track the poison following a spate of killings and suicides in the country.

“Cyanide became one of the most searched words on Google and search engines after 11 of our citizens died in three incidents,” Ibrahim Kalin, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman, said on Tuesday. “I would like to underline that these are not collective suicides but murders.”

Still menaced by unemployment and debt after a recession, Turkey has been jolted by deadly copycat poisonings across the country, many of them using cyanide, which is toxic to people even in minuscule quantities and could apparently be bought online.

Police officers discovered the bodies of a man, his wife and two children in their home in Antalya on Nov. 9. The father left a note, saying he had been jobless for the past nine months and couldn’t go on, NTV reported on its website. The deaths may have been caused by cyanide, the Cumhuriyet newspaper said.

Poisonous Epidemic

The incident appeared similar to a collective suicide days earlier in Istanbul, when four adult siblings were found dead in their homes due to cyanide poisoning. The Anadolu Agency cited a friend of the deceased as saying they were suffering from severe economic hardship.

The last tragedy to take place struck a family of three, including a child, who were found dead last week in Istanbul, poisoned by cyanide. A prosecutor’s office in the city said the father sank into depression because of excessive indebtedness and killed himself after poisoning his wife and child, according to Haberturk newspaper.

The suicides follow more than a year of economic tumult after a currency crisis dragged the nation into its first recession in a decade. Many companies have struggled to repay debt, while inflation and unemployment have soared.

The poverty threshold for a four-person household stands at 6,705 liras ($1,176) per month, according to a monthly survey by the Turk-Is labor confederation. That’s more than three times the monthly minimum wage. The official unemployment rate rose to 14% in August, corresponding to 4.7 million people in the nation of 82 million.

Turkey’s joblessness can be explained by an increase in labor-force participation that’s become “exceptionally higher” than in the past, Erdogan said on Tuesday. Unemployment isn’t elevated “because we couldn’t create jobs,” he said.

--With assistance from Firat Kozok.

To contact the reporter on this story: Cagan Koc in Istanbul at ckoc2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Onur Ant at oant@bloomberg.net, Paul Abelsky, Tony Halpin

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