Musa Anter, affectionately known as “Apê Musa” (Uncle Musa), was a prominent Kurdish writer who contributed columns to the daily Özgür Gündem and the weekly Yeni Ülke. He was shot and killed in Diyarbakır on 20 September 1992.

Lured from his hotel by a telephone caller who asked him to help settle a property dispute, Anter and a friend set off in a taxi with an unknown man, described as between 25 and 30 years old. When they began to suspect that a trap was being set, they demanded to get out of the taxi. The man accompanying them also got out and, having walked in front of them, began shooting at them with a gun.

Anter was struck by four bullets and died soon afterward. The friend, hit by two bullets, was seriously injured. Amnesty International reported that a 14-shot 9 mm gun was used in the attack, which the group says occurred on the outskirts of the city near a police station and a manned traffic control point.

Anter, who did not live in Diyarbakır, was visiting the city to sign books during a cultural festival. A previously unknown group, Boz-Ok, claimed responsibility for the killing, but editors at Yeni Ülke and Özgür Gündem discounted the claim, blaming the state and counterguerrillas.

Born in 1920 in the village of Zivingê in Nusaybin, Anter experienced many things during his lifetime that others knew only by hearsay. He experienced the founding years of the Turkish Republic, the uprising of Sheikh Said and the genocide in Dersim as a schoolboy, and the Second World War as a student.

He was one of the protagonists of the short spring of the Kurdish national movement at the end of the 1950s; in the "Trial of 49" he was accused of Kurdish propaganda and separatism. The background was his poem Qimil (Weevil), which he had published in Kurdish in the magazine Ileri Yurt in August 1959. The magazine, based in Amed (Diyarbakir), was again the first magazine in decades to deal with the Kurdish question. Musa Anter was the editor.

Abdülkadir Aygan, a former PKK militant turned informant and recruited by JITEM (the Turkish Gendarmerie's Intelligence and Counter-terrorism Service), said he had been part of a JITEM unit, along with a "Hamit" from Şırnak, which had assassinated Musa Anter.

Turkey was found guilty of Anter's murder in 2006 by the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR), and sentenced to a fine of 28,500 euros.

In 2009, 17 years after the murder, Turkish prosecutors reopened the case following Aygan’s 2004 interview in which he confessed to being involved in Anter’s killing. In 2010, the case was merged with two other trials involving several alleged JİTEM members, including Aygan, as defendants. The merged trial started to be known as the “main JİTEM trial” (as there were others). Turkey’s military confirmed the unofficial existence of the JİTEM as a temporary intelligence unit from 1988 to 1990 that was made official before being disbanded in 2001, a trial memo said. 

Hamit Yıldırım, whom Aygan accused of being the gunman, was arrested in Turkey in 2012 but released in 2017, when the legal limit for a person to be held without conviction was reached.

The trial was transferred from Diyarbakır to Ankara in 2015 for security reasons, reports said.

Anter’s murder case, or the “main JİTEM trial,” was dropped by the sixth Ankara Court of Serious Crimes on September 21, 2022, due to the statute of limitations,