The police called days after the crash you drove away from: what that summons already means.

A call that comes days or weeks after a collision is neither a mistake nor a formality. It means the traffic police report has reached a prosecutor, that the report already records that a driver left the scene, and that you are being called to be heard as a suspect — şüpheli — in a file opened without you and written before anyone heard your account of it.

How you were traced is usually unremarkable: a plate read from a camera or given by a witness, the registration record, the address on it. The contact reaches you as a phone call from a police station, as a written summons, or at a border check the next time you present a passport.

The delay tells you nothing about how serious the file is. Under TCK 66 the prosecution period is eight years for offences whose upper limit does not exceed five years, and both the leaving-the-scene offence in KTK 81 and negligent injury under TCK 89 sit inside that. Weeks of silence are normal. So are months.

What the delay does change is the evidence. By the time you are called the scene is gone, footage from private premises has usually been overwritten, and the only fixed version of that evening is the one the officers wrote down. If you were not summoned but stopped and taken into custody, the timetable is a different one and is set out in what happens when you are arrested in Türkiye.

The third paragraph of KTK 81 was replaced on 12 February 2026 by article 27 of Law no. 7574, and it turns on a single fact: whether a person was hurt.

In an injury or death case the two sanctions stack: the 46,000 TL administrative fine under the first sentence and the one-to-three-year prison sentence under the second. A licence withdrawn on that basis is not handed back until every administrative fine imposed under the Highway Traffic Code has been collected in full. That condition is written into the paragraph; it is not left to anyone's discretion.

The lawful way out never covered an injury. KTK 81/2 lets everyone involved leave without waiting for an officer only where the accident caused material damage alone, and only where they record the position between them in writing. A passenger who goes to hospital that night with a neck complaint removes that exemption from a departure that felt agreed at the roadside. This is the most common route by which a foreign driver ends up inside the prison sentence rather than the fine. Which paragraph of TCK 89 the collision itself falls under is fixed by a medical report, and is dealt with in causing injury in a traffic accident.

Foreign drivers are often told, correctly, that a road injury case in Türkiye can be ended by the injured person. Under TCK 89/5 the investigation and prosecution of negligent injury depend on a complaint, except where conscious negligence is found and the injury goes beyond the first paragraph. TCK 73/1 allows six months for that complaint, running under TCK 73/2 from the day the person learned of the act and of who committed it, and TCK 73/4 makes withdrawal end the case. Negligent injury also sits inside criminal mediation under CMK 253/1-b-2.

None of that reaches the departure. KTK 81/3 does not depend on a complaint, so there is nobody with the power to withdraw it. And CMK 253/2 makes mediation available for offences created by other statutes only where the statute expressly provides for it — KTK 81 provides nothing. The consequence is the part people find hardest to accept: the injured person can be paid in full, can withdraw the complaint, can sign a settlement at the mediation bureau, and the prosecutor still holds a file about the minutes after the collision.

Compensation remains worth making, for a different reason. Full compensation of the loss is a statutory condition of deferral of the pronouncement of judgment under CMK 231/6, and the court may attach the same condition to a suspended sentence under TCK 51/2. It works on the sentence, not on the charge.

You attend as a suspect, and three things are decided that day rather than later.

Language. Where a suspect cannot express themselves adequately in Turkish, an interpreter is appointed at the investigation stage by the judge or the prosecutor (CMK 202). In this file a single sentence carries the defence: whether you said you did not feel the impact, or that you did not think it was serious. Those are not the same admission, and the record is written in Turkish.

Evidence. CMK 147 requires that a suspect be reminded they may ask for concrete evidence to be collected to dispel the suspicion. Ask, and have the request entered in the record by name — the cameras on that stretch of road, an examination of the vehicle's damage, the location history your own phone already holds. A request written down that day is worth more than an application filed after the footage is gone.

What follows. The protection in CMK 100/4, which bars remand where the offence carries an upper limit of two years or less, does not help here: the KTK 81 offence reaches three years. What is realistically sought instead is judicial control under CMK 109 — a prohibition on leaving the country (CMK 109/3-a), and a prohibition on driving with surrender of the licence against a receipt (CMK 109/3-d). It can run for months, and under CMK 109/6 the time is not deducted from any sentence later imposed. What that means for work and flights is set out in travel bans during a criminal case.

The duties KTK 81 imposes at the scene, the necessity exception inside the third paragraph, and the damage-only version of the same conduct are set out on leaving the scene of an accident.