3 SLAIN AT BIBLE DISTRIBUTOR IN TURKEY
By Benjamin Harvey
Journal Gazette and Times-Courier, IL
April 18 2007
ISTANBUL, Turkey – Assailants tied up three people at a publishing
house that distributes Bibles in Turkey and then slit their throats
Wednesday, adding to a string of attacks apparently targeting the
country’s tiny Christian minority.
The killings occurred in Malatya, a city in central Turkey known as a
hotbed of Turkish nationalism and is the hometown of Mehmet Ali Agca,
the gunman who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Malatya Gov. Ibrahim Dasoz said two of the victims at the Zirve
publishing house were found already dead and the third died after
being taken to the hospital. All had their throats cut and their
hands and legs were bound, he said.
Dasoz said police detained four suspects and were investigating
whether another man who suffered head injuries when he jumped from
the window of the publisher’s office may have been involved in the
attack. He was reported undergoing surgery for his injury.
The German Embassy said one victim was German. "I am shocked that a
German citizen is among the victims. Even if the exact circumstances
of the crime are not yet known, I most strongly condemn this brutal
crime," German Ambassador Eckart Cuntz said in a statement.
Another victim was Turkish, Dasoz said, but he could not confirm the
nationality of the third person killed.
Zirve’s general manager told CNN-Turk television that his employees had
recently been threatened. "We know that they have been receiving some
threats," Hamza Ozant said, but could not say who made the threats.
The publishing house had been targeted previously in protests by
nationalists who accused it of proselytizing in this overwhelmingly
Muslim but officially secular country, Dogan news agency reported.
Making up less than 1 percent of Turkey’s 70 million people, Christians
have increasingly become targets amid what some fear is a rising tide
of hostility toward non-Muslims.
In February 2006, a teenager fatally shot a Catholic priest as he
prayed in his church, and two more Catholic priests were attacked
later in the year. A November visit by Pope Benedict XVI was greeted
by nonviolent protests, and early this year a gunman killed Armenian
Christian editor Hrant Dink.
Associated Press writer Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara contributed to
this report.