PanARMENIAN.Net

Turkish nationalists were going to kill Archbishop Mutafyan?
09.03.2007 12:52 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ 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 tiny Armenian
community. "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, the agency reported. It was not clear whether he had
intended to physically attack the patriarch or scare him.

Later Wednesday, 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. 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. It was led by Patriarch
Mesrob II, who represents the 80,000 Armenians in Turkey. Anxiety has
engulfed the Armenian community and intellectuals since Dink’s murder
on Januray 19, and in recent interviews Mesrob II has said that his
office had been receiving threats. Dink had angered nationalist
circles and the courts for describing the World War I massacres of
Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide, a label that Ankara
fiercely rejects. Nine people have so far been charged over his
murder, which prosecutors believe was the work of ultra-nationalists,
reports the AFP.