Woman reunited with missing dog 12 years later and 1,000 miles from home
‘Close this issue, leave it alone’,” said Gergerlioglu.
Those who took them wanted “to interrogate them for a long time,” he added.
The four men have since been formally charged over suspected Gulen links. “I assume that the goal here is to spread terror” among suspected Gulen supporters, said Ozturk Turkdogan, head of the Turkish Human Rights Association. “Obviously our main suspect is the state,” he added. Turkdogan said the disappearances often followed a similar pattern, particularly the use of black VW Transporters, according to CCTV images or witnesses. Contacted by AFP, no comment was provided by the Ankara public prosecutor’s office and police, while the interior ministry did not respond to requests.
Why is my partner not being released? What do they want to do? Is he still alive?
Sumeyye Yilmaz
New disappearance
DUTCHESS the fox terrier squeezed out the door at her owner’s house in Orlando, Florida, one day in February 2007 and didn’t return.
A devastated Katheryn Strang made “lost dog” signs and took daily trips to the local shelter for months, desperate to find her.
On Friday, Strang finally got the reunion she had been hoping for - 12 years after Dutchess disappeared.
A man found the dog under his shed in the Pittsburgh area, almost 1,000 miles from Orlando.
He took the shivering animal to a shelter, Humane Animal Rescue. There, a scan of Dutchess’s microchip linked her to Strang, who had since moved to Boca Raton, Florida.
At the shelter on Friday, Strang cried as an employee handed her the dog she had always hoped would one day return to her.
Staff members posted footage of the emotional reunion on Facebook, writing, “This is why we do what we do.”
“Dutchess. Hi, baby. I missed you,” Strang says in the video as she strokes the dog’s face. “Your face is all white.”
No one knows how Dutchess made the trek to Pittsburgh - or what she has been doing for the past 12 years.
Strang joked that the dog could “tell me some stories.”
She said she couldn’t imagine that Dutchess had walked the whole way.
The dog, who is now 14, was hungry, shaking and “in serious need of a nail trim” when she arrived at the shelter, said Torin Fisher, an admissions counselor with Humane Animal Rescue.
She was also “a little nervous about the situation, which, who could blame her?” Fisher said.
But otherwise, Dutchess was in pretty good shape.
Shelter employees soon found the microchip - an implanted device that contains a unique number that can be traced back to an animal’s owner.
Seeing that Dutchess’s owner lived in Florida, Fisher figured the family must have recently moved to Pittsburgh.
Only when she called Strang did she learn “how incredible of a situation it actually was.”
“The whole story kind of unfolded while we were on the phone,” Fisher said.
“And we were equally excited and shocked and surprised.”
Strang had always held out hope that Dutchess might be found, even after so many years.
She paid a US$15 annual fee to keep the microchip active, saying on Friday that she would have continued that for years. — The Washington Post