Shooting suspect says his target was Armenian Patriarch

ArmRadio.am
09.03.2007 17:22

A Turkish man accused of firing in the air outside an Armenian Church
claimed Wednesday his real target had been Patriarch Mesrob II, the
spiritual leader of the Armenian community, the Turkish Daily News
reports referring to Anatolia news agency reported.

"I had prepared it for (Mesrob) Mutafyan II," Volkan Karova shouted to
reporters here as he and fellow suspect Yilmaz Can Ozalp were being
escorted to the prosecutor’s office to give their testimony.

It was not clear whether he had intended to physically attack the
Patriarch or scare him. A court charged the two men with "threatening
by firing shots" and "carrying an unlicensed gun" and sent them to
jail pending trial, the agency said.

Let us remind that the pair had been arrested late Sunday just hours
after two men fired a shot in the air outside a Church in the city’s
Kumkapi district.

At the time, a ceremony was being held there for slain ethnic Armenian
journalist Hrant Dink. The ceremony at the church, on the European
side of Istanbul, was to mark the 40th day since Dink, the 52-year-old
ethnic Armenian editor of the bilingual Agos weekly, was shot dead
outside his office.