Leyla Çelik, 38, a part-time student voting in Istanbul's conservative Fatih district, hoped the AKP would continue in power.
Leyla Zana, a member of the Turkish parliament imprisoned for ten years for speaking in Kurdish in the parliament building, was released last year after intense pressure from abroad.
The confessions of Hilmi and Leyla Tugluoglu, two suspects who ran a secretive Islamic theological school for fellow Turks in Damascus, have reinforced al-Qaeda's claims that it masterminded the truck bombings of two synagogues, the British consulate and a British-based bank.Yet the remaining Turkish detainees from Syria mostly students were freed.
Both elder Yunuses suffer from medical conditions, and Leyla Yunus has told her lawyer of being beaten, both by prison guards and by a cellmate.
A greater wonder is that Mr Oncel's widow, Leyla, is still alive.
And hours later a Turkish appeal court ordered the release of the country's most prominent female Kurdish politician, Leyla Zana, and three colleagues, who had spent ten years in jail after being convicted in 1994 on charges of belonging to the Kurdish separatist rebel group, the PKK.
And honour crimes are not a uniquely Kurdish phenomenon, says Leyla Pervizat, an Istanbul-based expert.
"The deaths of Leyla and Patricia would have been prevented if the crimes against humanity during the dictatorship had been judged and punished," argues Cristina Torres, a justice-ministry official, who says she was herself tortured by Mr Azar during the military regime.Poverty is as endemic as are corruption and police brutality.
To score points with the European Union, Turkish television recently began its first-ever broadcasts in Kurdish, and a court has released Leyla Zana, a Kurdish politician but an amnesty for the rebels is unlikely.
And there is Leyla Zana, the Kurdish parliamentarian who shortly after she was released from prison last year went to Brussels to receive the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.The official republican line on women is written on a wall inside the Ataturk memorial at Anit Kabir.
There is growing concern about Leyla Yunus, a leading human-rights activist, and her husband Arif, a historian.
