The mayor, who was imprisoned after the cable car accident, cancelled his project: 'I don't want to utter a single word about it.'

The Mayor of Kepez, Mesut Kocagöz, who was imprisoned for 57 days following the cable car accident in Konyaaltı district on April 12, in which one person died, 7 people were injured, and 174 people were rescued after being trapped for 23 hours, talked about his experiences during his time in prison.

"THE FIRST 3 DAYS WERE SHOCKING"

Mesut Kocagöz, who stated that he resigned from the presidency and general management of ANET on November 28, 2023, due to the last resignation day for candidacy being December 1, and became a candidate, said, "The elections started and we couldn't go home for about 4.5 months anyway. But this unfortunate accident happened on April 12," he said.

Kocagöz, who said that he was called to the prosecutor's office on April 14 and was arrested by the duty court, said that he stayed in a 16-person cell for 57 days. Mayor Kocagöz said, "We entered, we didn't understand for the first 3 days, we were in shock. We gradually came to ourselves. We had the chance to talk to our family on the phone. Our family came to visit us. We woke up at 7 a.m., went for a count at 8 a.m. Then we had breakfast. I walked a little, took a stroll. At first, people listened to themselves, but after a while, those walls come at you incredibly. You see how valuable the air is, how valuable the water is, and how valuable freedom is there," he said.

"I DON'T WANT TO MENTION THE 'T' WORD OF THE CABLE CAR"

Mesut Kocagöz, who was released on June 11, the day of the first trial, reminded that he promised a cable car project for Kepez during his candidacy for mayor. After the accident and the 57-day prison process, Mesut Kocagöz announced that he canceled this project and said, "I don't want to mention the 'T' word of the cable car. That cable car accident is actually not a system error, but an operator error. It stopped there hundreds of times because the cable car is sensitive to sudden weather changes. Meteorology informs us, there will be a storm, what will you do? You stop it while people are in the air. You evacuate it with the rescue motor of that place, manually. It's that simple actually. If this friend hadn't started it for the second time, there wouldn't have been an accident," he said.

A "VOLTA" MEMORY IN PRISON

Kocagöz, who said that they watched a lot of TV series because they had a lot of time in prison, mentioned the series 'İnci Taneleri' and said, "Yılmaz Erdoğan talks about it in the series. He says he was in prison, 'You take 11 steps, there is no 12th step.' Then a fellow prisoner from our cell said, 'Well, how many steps do we take for a stroll?' People have been there for years but they haven't paid attention. I said '16'. Of course, everyone is downstairs in the morning. I know everyone is counting. They say, 'Well, it turned out to be true, sir.' I said, 'We take 16 steps, there is no 17th step'," he said.