Syrian opposition activist and her journalist daughter murdered in Turkey

A Syrian opposition activist and her journalist daughter have been found murdered in their apartment in Istanbul, the Istanbul police department said on Friday.

The bodies of 60-year-old Orouba Barakat and her 22-year-old daughter Halla were found overnight in their apartment in Istanbul’s Uskudar neighbourhood in the Asian side of the city.

Turkish media reports said Orouba Barakat was investigating alleged torture in government prisons in Syria. It said she had initially lived in Britain, then the United Arab Emirates before coming to Istanbul.

“The hand of tyranny and injustice assassinated my sister Doctor Orouba and her daughter Halla in their apartment in Istanbul,” Orouba’s sister Shaza wrote on Facebook, adding that they were stabbed to death.

“Orouba wrote headlines in the first page and she pursued criminals and exposed them. Her name and her daughter’s name, Halla, now made first page headlines,” Shaza added.

Orouba Barakat was also the aunt of one of three Muslim college students who were shot dead by a neighbour in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 2015.

Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and sister-in-law Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were murdered in what their family described as a hate crime.

In a Facebook post, Orouba Baraka’s niece Suzanne wrote: “How many more beloved family members will I lose to hatred and violence? We are not safe anywhere.”

Halla Barakat was a journalist on a website called Orient News.

Describing her cousin, Suzanne Barakat wrote: “I’ll always remember Halla, whose name means beauty, as the little girl with golden curls and bright green eyes. She grew to become a dynamic, educated, kind, fun-loving, social justice-oriented individual, just like her mom.”

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Turkey has become home to almost three million Syrian refugees, many of them opponents of the regime of the president, Bashar al-Assad.