Hit and run in Türkiye: leaving the scene is its own prison offence.

Turkish law does not treat driving away as an aggravating detail of the collision. It treats it as a second, freestanding offence, prosecuted in the same file and sentenced on its own. That is the difficulty for a foreign driver who left a fatal scene: what arrives is not one charge with a bad fact inside it, but two charges that add up.

The withdrawn licence is not returned until every administrative fine issued under the Highway Traffic Code in the file has been paid in full. That is a statutory condition, not a discretionary one.

The prison sentence in KTK 81 carries a qualification that decides a great many files. It reaches a driver who leaves zaruret dışında — other than out of necessity. Carrying a dying passenger to the nearest hospital is capable of being necessity for that journey. Continuing home afterwards without telling any authority is a separate act, and the two are assessed separately.

Once there is a death or an injury, testing under KTK 48 is compulsory rather than discretionary. The driver must be examined; where the person has died or is too badly hurt to blow into a device, blood, saliva or urine is taken instead, under the procedure of CMK 75 with its fifth paragraph disapplied. Refusing the roadside measurement is priced separately: 150,000 Turkish lira and the licence withdrawn for five years.

Leaving the scene does not erase any of this. It moves the uncertainty onto you. The thresholds that would otherwise have been settled by a printout stay open, and each of them carries its own consequence:

• Above 0.50 promille in a private car — a 25,000 TL administrative fine and the licence withdrawn for six months, even where the conduct also amounts to an offence.
• Above 0.50 in a private car or 0.20 in any other vehicle, where an accident follows — the Criminal Code provisions apply on top, by express reference in KTK 48.
• Above 1.00 promille — TCK 179/3 as well: six months to two years, a third sentence in the same file.
• Awareness of the risk — if the court finds you foresaw the outcome and drove anyway, TCK 22/3 raises the negligence sentence by one-third to one-half.

Remand under CMK 100 requires strong suspicion supported by concrete evidence, plus a ground. The first listed ground is concrete facts raising a suspicion that the suspect will flee. In a hit-and-run file the prosecutor does not have to look for such a fact. The conduct charged is the fact: you were at the scene of a death and you left it.

The usual protection does not help here either. CMK 100/4 bars remand where the offence carries only a judicial fine, or where the upper limit of the prison sentence is not more than two years, save for offences committed intentionally against bodily integrity, which are carved out of that bar. TCK 85/1 reaches six years and the KTK 81 offence reaches three, so both sit outside that bar. A foreign passport, a return ticket and an address abroad are then read alongside the departure from the scene, and the argument for release has to be built rather than assumed.

What is realistically sought is judicial control under CMK 109 in place of remand: a ban on leaving the country, regular reporting to a named police station, surrender of the driving licence against receipt, and where the court asks for it, a security sum fixed by the judge with the family of the deceased in mind. Those conditions are argued at the first hearing before the magistrate, not later. What happens in the hours before that hearing is set out in arrested in Türkiye, and the release application itself in remand and judicial control.

The two sentences are also assessed separately for everything that comes after conviction, and this is where the second charge quietly changes the outcome.

A prison sentence may be suspended under TCK 51 only if it is two years or less and you have no earlier deliberate conviction over three months. Deferral of the verdict — HAGB under CMK 231 — is available where the sentence imposed is two years or less or is a judicial fine, and only where the loss caused to the victim or to the public has been made good in full, a condition that has stood since 2006; where it cannot be met at once, CMK 231/9 allows the deferral against an undertaking to pay the loss in monthly instalments across the supervision period. The paragraphs were redrafted on 16 July 2026 by Law no. 7589, and the supervision period that follows is five years. Each offence is measured against those limits on its own. A one-year sentence for leaving the scene may sit inside them while a three-year sentence for the death does not, and the file then produces a custodial term regardless.

There is one further step that applies only to foreign nationals. Under TCK 59, once a foreign national sentenced to imprisonment is released on licence, moved to supervised execution, or has served the sentence out, the file is reported immediately to the Ministry of the Interior so that removal can be considered. Conviction does not deport you by itself; it starts a separate administrative assessment. The interaction is set out in suspended sentences and HAGB and in deportation and entry bans.

The most common version of this case is not a driver who fled. It is a driver who stopped, saw a crowd forming, understood nothing that was said, and drove on because nobody appeared to be stopping them — and who learns weeks later, sometimes after leaving Türkiye, that someone died. If that is your position, three things matter more than anything you might say in explanation:

• Do not give an account before the file is read. Camera footage, the accident report and the forensic timing of death fix what can and cannot be argued. A statement given without them is difficult to correct afterwards.
• Preserve the vehicle and the phone. Damage profile, tachograph or navigation data and location history are frequently what separates a driver who did not know from a driver who did.
• Presenting yourself is a decision with consequences, not a formality. It affects remand, and it affects the finding on necessity. It should be timed with counsel, not attempted alone at a police station.

How causation, fault apportionment between the drivers and the expert report are argued on the death itself belongs to the main charge, and is set out in fatal road accidents in Türkiye. The duties owed at the scene, and the damage-only version of the same offence, are on leaving the scene of an accident. Where the person survives the charge is TCK 89 and the route through the case is materially different: see traffic accidents causing injury.