List of Famous people born on January 1st

Erol Sabancı is a billionaire Turkish banker and a member of the Sabancı family. Sabancı is the Honorary Chairman of Akbank. He has been board member of Akbank since 1963, Turkey’s most valuable and profitable bank.

Akira Yamaguchi is a Japanese contemporary artist.

Ali Belhadj is an Algerian Islamist activist and preacher and cofounder of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) political party, the winner of the June 1990 local elections and the 1991 Algerian legislative election.

Mohamed Beltagy is an Egyptian physician and Muslim Brotherhood politician. He was a Member of Parliament from 2005 to 2010, and is currently the general secretary of the Freedom and Justice Party.

Soner Yalçın is a Turkish journalist and writer. The co-founder of the news website odatv, he was arrested in February 2011 along with other odatv journalists and charged with links to the Ergenekon organization. He was released pending trial in December 2012.

Laure Prouvost is a French artist living and working in Antwerp, Belgium. She won the 2013 Turner Prize. In 2019, she represented France at the Venice Biennale with the multi-media work "The Deep Blue Sea Surrounding You".

Ikuma Sekigawa is a Japanese footballer currently playing as a defender for Kashima Antlers.

Yasin Hayal is a Turkish criminal who is serving a life sentence for the assassination of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. He has served a ten-month prison term for bombing a McDonald's restaurant in the city of Trabzon, Turkey. He has been on trial for allegedly inciting Ogün Samast to assassinate Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. On January 16, 2012, Hayal was found guilty of soliciting Dink's murder by a Turkish court and sentenced to life imprisonment. The ruling was later abolished, and in a new trial Hayal was sentenced to 7 and a half years imprisonment in July 2019.

Carsten Koch is a German organist, choral conductor and academic. He is the church musician at the Unionskirche in Idstein, Hesse, conducting the concert choir Idsteiner Kantorei and the orchestra Nassauische Kammerphilharmonie that he founded. He lectured orchestral conducting at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts.

Hikmet Çetin is a Turkish politician former minister of foreign affairs and was leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP) for a short time. He served also as the Speaker of the Turkish Grand National Assembly.