Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu

Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu (December 31, 1954 – March 25, 2009) was a Turkish politician and member of the Parliament of Turkey. He was the leader and founder of the Great Union Party (BBP), a far-right, nationalist-Islamist political party.

Biography
Yazıcıoğlu was born 1954 in a small village named Elmalı in Şarkışla of Sivas Province. He studied in Şarkışla from primary school to high school after that he was educated at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Ankara University. He was a member of the ultranationalist Grey Wolves. After the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, Yazıcıoğlu was arrested for being one of the leaders of Grey Wolves. He stayed for seven years in prison until his release in 1987. In the following years, Yazıcıoğlu was involved in politics as a member of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party. In 1991, he and some of his fellows left this movement and established a new political party called Great Union Party with a more Islamist ideology.

His party has been represented in the Parliament only via electoral coalitions with popular parties. At the 2002 legislative elections, the party won 1.1% of the popular vote and no seats; in the 2007 elections Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu was elected as an independent.

Death
Yazıcıoğlu died on March 25, 2009, in a helicopter crash in the southern Turkish province of Kahramanmaraş, after a political rally there on the way to the next rally in Yozgat just four days before the local elections. The pilot and three other passengers also died in the accident. After the crash, Ismail Güneş who was one of the passengers, called the Turkish emergency service number 112 and was able to talk to the dispatcher clearly.

Yazıcıoğlu received a state funeral to which most of the party leaders attended. Thousands of people joined his funeral ceremony in Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara. After his death, in the 2009 local elections the BBP's candidate was elected as the new mayor of Sivas.