International Herald Tribune, France
Jan 28 2007

Unknown assailants break windows of Protestant church in Turkey
The Associated PressPublished: January 28, 2007

ANKARA, Turkey: Unknown assailants on Sunday stoned a two-story
building housing a Protestant church in the Black Sea port city of
Samsun, the pastor of the church said.

"The assailants broke at least 10 windows in an overnight attack,"
Mehmet Orhan Picaklar, the pastor of the Agape Church, told The
Associated Press by telephone. "This is the seventh or eight such
attack over the past three years. Separately, I am constantly
receiving death threats by e-mail."

Picaklar said the church had moved into the building just two weeks
ago. Uniformed police officers were deployed outside the church after
the attack, the private Dogan news agency reported.

The attack was the latest against Christians in this predominantly
Muslim country.

Ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who spoke out about the mass
killings of Armenians in the early 20th century, was gunned down
outside his newspaper on Jan. 19.

Last February, a Turkish teenager shot dead a Catholic priest, the
Rev. Andrea Santoro, as he knelt in prayer in his church in the Black
Sea port of Trabzon. The attack was believed linked to widespread
anger in the Islamic world over the publication in European
newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Two other Catholic
priests were also attacked last year.

Of Turkey’s 70 million people, some 65,000 are Armenian Orthodox
Christians, 20,000 are Roman Catholic, and 3,500 are Protestant,
mostly converts from Islam. Around 2,000 are Greek Orthodox and
23,000 are Jewish.