- The Observer,
- Sunday November 23 2003
Dragged, bleeding and unconscious, from the rubble of the blast outside the British Consulate in Istanbul, she had asked the man beside her 'How are you?', thinking he was her boyfriend, 34-year-old Briton Graham Carter. Doctors at the state-run Taksim Hospital heard her and added her list to the name of British rather than Turkish survivors, accidentally hiding her from her loved ones.
Her true identity was revealed when her brother, Savas, went out searching for her. He said yesterday: 'I had not slept for two days because I had been frantically searching for my sister. Her name did not come up on hospital lists, probably because they had put her down as an English person.
'I found out Graham was in the American hospital and went to see him. He started to cry and then I started to cry as well. He obviously cares a lot for my sister and he did all he could to try to find her. He said "Hulya, Hulya, Hulya", he was crying and saying "Savas, please find her".'
When Savas found his sister in the Taksim hospital he could not recognise her face because of her injuries. 'I recognised her earrings, her necklace and her fingers and hands because she was wearing a ring I bought with her five years ago. The doctors say Hulya has little chance of survival but we are praying to God that she pulls through. Our family is still in shock and we are praying all the time that Hulya will get through this.
'We are four brothers and Hulya was our only sister. She was like a goddess to us. Look! Look at how beautiful she was,' he said holding a passport-sized picture of his sister to his chest. 'Her great dream was to go to England.'
The couple were applying for a visa for Hulya Donmez at the consulate when it was attacked by a suicide bomber. They had made a 12-hour bus journey from the tourist resort of Marmaris and were caught in the explosion moments after entering the consulate building. Friends in his home village said Carter had proposed in September and wanted his fiancée to spend Christmas in Britain.
Donmez was pronounced brain dead by doctors yesterday, while Carter is believed to have undergone surgery to remove debris blown into his eyes from the blast but doctors say it is too early to say whether his injuries might leave him blind. Medics warned that he had suffered deep 'psychological trauma'.
He was captured by television cameras moments after the attack, staggering bloodstained and blinded through the wreckage of the British consulate crying out 'I'm English, I'm English' through the clouds of dust and debris.
Britons killed in the bomb attacks include Lisa Hallworth, 38 and single, who joined the the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 1987 and worked in cities including Madrid, Geneva and New York. She moved to Istanbul in 2000 as personal assistant to the Consul General, Roger Short, 59, who also died in the blast. Short was a year away from retirement.
A third victim has been named as mother-of-three Nanette Elizabeth Kurma, also know as Elizabeth Clarke, who was an interpreter and worked with bereaved families. Originally from Drongan, Ayrshire, she left the UK several years ago to work in Turkey, where she married a local man and settled in Istanbul.
Her distraught brother Ronald Clarke, from Drongan, said his sister's children, who still live in Scotland, were devastated. 'She had been over there for quite a few years and was happy in her work. She came back during the summer. She loved coming home to Scotland.'
