By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – U.S. authorities on Friday arrested a Turkish author and her 17-year-old son wanted by Turkey on charges that he was involved in a fatal car crash in Istanbul and then fled the country with the help of his mother.
Turkish novelist and poet Eylem Tok and her son, Timur Cihantimur, will appear in federal court in Boston following their arrest on an extradition request from Turkey.
Their arrests were announced on the social media platform
Their arrests came after Interpol granted Turkey’s request last month to issue a red alert for both Tok and her son. A red notice is a request to law enforcement officials to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition.
Defense attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to prosecutors, the teenager was driving a Porsche on the night of March 1 when, while driving around a bend at high speed, he crashed into a group of people with all-terrain vehicles. One person, Oguz Murat Aci, died and four others were injured.
Prosecutors said the teen immediately fled the scene after saying something like “my life is over.” Airport security footage captured him and his mother at an Egyptair ticketing office three hours later, prosecutors said.
Tok bought both one-way tickets from Istanbul to Cairo, Egypt, and they flew on to the United States, landing in New York on March 2, court papers show.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara; Writing by Burcu Karakas; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
