CHRISTIAN BIBLE PUBLISHERS MURDERED IN TURKEY
by Daniel Blake

ChristianToday, UK
April 19 2007

Three Bible publishing house workers have been killed in the latest
attack on Turkey’s minority Christian community on Wednesday.

Three Bible publishing house workers have been killed in the latest
attack on Turkey’s minority Christian community on Wednesday.

Photo: Turkish police officers wrestle an unidentified man down
following an attack at a publishing house in the south-eastern Turkish
city of Malatya, April 18, 2007. Attackers slit the throats of three…

(REUTERS/Ihlas News Agency)

The attackers bound their victims before slitting their throats
in the publishing house in Malatya, a city in central Turkey and a
nationalist stronghold.

Four people are believed to have been detained for questioning
regarding the killings, and one other suspect that fell from the
building was taken to the hospital with head trauma.

It has emerged that one of those murdered was of German nationality,
German Ambassador to Turkey Eckart Cuntz said.

Images appeared on television stations showing police leading several
young men out of the building where the killings took place.

Political tensions are rising in the secular but largely Sunni Muslim
country over the past year, with Armenian-Turkish editor Hrant Dink
being shot dead by an ultranationalist youth earlier this year.

Late last year the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict
XVI, paid a short visit to Turkey to ease relations, but during the
visit a number of protests broke out in Istanbul. There have been
reports of an increase in violence against Christian clergy since
the visit.

Christian missionaries are routinely accused by Turkish nationalists
of attempting to undermine Turkey’s political and religious order.

The EU has clamped down on hostilities towards Christian missionaries
in Turkey, however, telling the country that the Christian minority
must be given more religious freedom in order to reach the level of
religious freedom acceptable for entry to the EU.

Carlos Madrigal, an evangelical pastor in Turkey, told Reuters:
"We would like a government campaign to get rid of the myths, such
as that missionaries are trying to divide the country, these are the
things which feed such acts.

"In some ways the situation has improved because we have got
legal rights … but there are parts of society which have become
radicalised."