A former civilian employee of the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) has been found not guilty on child sexual abuse charges. His lawyer says it was a case of mistaken identity. Yasin Cetin was charged with sexual assault, luring a child under 16, and making or distributing child sexual abuse materials in March 2025. EPS began an investigation after receiving a report that a 14-year-old boy had been sexually assaulted by a man he met on Snapchat. On Thursday, Cetin was found not guilty of child luring and sexual assault and the case involving the child sexual abuse materials was dismissed. Cetin’s lawyer says his client was arrested based on a screenshot of a video of a sexual encounter involving the victim and an unknown man. “There was a very poor quality still image that was taken off of a video,” Zachary Al-Khatib told CTV News Edmonton on Friday. “There’s a momentary glance of a face, and the police believed that that face looked like my client, Yasin Cetin, and the Crown who saw that photo also believed that it looked like my client.” Al-Khatib says investigators never did a photo lineup with the victim to confirm his client was the assailant. He says during court proceedings, the victim testified that the only sexual encounter happened on the evening of Dec. 3, 2023, but he was able to prove that Cetin was somewhere else with other people during that time. “At 9:33 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2023, Yasin was with a group of his friends enjoying bubble tea, and we have a photograph of that, which is dated and time-stamped,” he said. “We have the friends who are with him. We have his own records of that evening, group chat records from WhatsApp. He was not there.” He says his client was emotional when the verdict was read on Thursday. “Yasin started crying. It was obviously very overwhelming. He’s been living with this for a number of years.” Al-Khatib says Cetin has been suffering from the fallout of the charges since his arrest. “He was arrested outside of his workplace in view of his colleagues, in view of other people. It was publicly humiliating. He’s been publicly humiliated ever since,” he said. He hopes now that Cetin’s court matters are concluded he can move on with his life. “I certainly hope this is the end of the road for my client in terms of the criminal aspect,” he said. “This is hopefully the first step in getting his life back.” With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nahreman Issa
