Atalay Filiz, 30, the suspected murderer of three people, was found competent to stand trial by a six-person board of experts from the Bakırköy Psychiatry Hospital, according to a report submitted to an Istanbul court yesterday. Filiz, who was present during the court session, is being tried in an Istanbul court for the 2016 murder of retired teacher Fatma Kayıkçı and in an Ankara court for the 2013 murders of Göktuğ Demirarslan and Elena Radchikova.

In the Istanbul trial, he was charged with murder, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. When asked was asked if he had anything to say in his defense, Filiz, who only shook his head in refusal in two previous sessions, this time answered, saying he would like to repeat his testimony. He then proceeded to read a 13-page document in which he claimed he committed the murders as well as several minor thefts in the past after "some powers instructed him to commit the crimes via messages in newspapers."

The court asked the prosecutor to complete his case with the new report in mind before ending the session. Filiz is also being tried for forging identification cards, which carries a sentence of 10 years in prison. Filiz was captured in June 2016 in İzmir, where he had been hiding since the May 28 murder of a 40-year-old woman in Istanbul's Tuzla district. He had been on the run from police since 2013, after he shot Demirarslan and Radchikova dead. The victims were his friends from his time in school in France. He said in his first interrogation that he killed the couple because they were asking him questions about Olga Seregina. Seregina was Filiz's girlfriend while in France and has been missing since 2011, but he has denied any involvement in her disappearance. He told police that he stabbed Fatma Kayıkçı, 40, to death after she recognized his true identity while he was living next door to the woman to whom he introduced himself with a fake name in Tuzla.

Depicted as a smart, refined and multilingual man in the media and an expert survivalist, Filiz was captured after he left his hideout in a forest where he was "fed up living with insects and starving", according to his interrogation. He said he was a high school dropout but convinced his family that he graduated from a French university and completed a master's degree at a Turkish university. Filiz was calm when he was captured and apparently sane, but further questioning by police determined that he might be mentally unstable or pretending to be so.