Reuters, UK
Jan 28 2007
Attackers stone Turkish church
Sun 28 Jan 2007 15:32:31 GMT
ISTANBUL, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Unidentified attackers threw stones at a
church in the northern Turkish town of Samsun on Sunday in the latest
attack on Christians in predominantly Muslim Turkey, Anatolian news
agency said.
Windows were broken but Mehmet Orhan Picakcilar, a priest at the
Agape Church, was quoted as saying there were no casualties.
"This does damage to Turkey. This attack depicts Turkey in a bad way
before international public opinion," Picakcilar said.
The attack happened hours after a nationalist protester with a
handgun made a brief attempt to hijack a commuter ferry in the
Dardanelles strait on Saturday.
Passengers said he had been angered by pro-Armenian sentiment in
Turkey after the Jan. 19 killing of the Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant
Dink, which prompted large pro-Armenian protests.
Growing nationalism among young people from Turkey’s Black Sea towns
has come under the spotlight since the teenager suspected of killing
Dink and his alleged supporters were found to have come from the town
of Trabzon.
A Catholic priest was killed in his church in Trabzon last February
by a Turkish teenager. The killing was believed to have been part of
protests in Islamic countries against cartoons in Danish newspapers
that mocked Prophet Mohammad.
Christians in secular Turkey — Armenians, Greeks, Syriacs,
Catholics, some Evangelical denominations and Jehovah’s Witnesses —
make up less than one percent of the country’s 72 million people.
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