CHRISTIAN CONVERTS MURDERED IN TURKEY
Nicholas Birch in Istanbul
Irish Times
Published: Apr 19, 2007
TURKEY: Two Turkish Christian converts and a German man were killed
yesterday in a publishing house that prints bibles, in the latest
attack on religious minorities living in mainly Muslim Turkey.
Security officials found the men with their hands and feet tied to
chairs and their throats cut in the office of Zirve Publishing in
the southeastern city of Malatya.
A fourth man was being treated for severe head wounds after he jumped
from a third-floor balcony to escape.
The attack comes two months after a nationalist gunman killed Turkish-
Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, a native of Malatya, on an Istanbul
street.
Television pictures showed police leading several young men out of
the building, apparently in handcuffs. Officials said that four men
had been taken into custody.
Turkish media reports claimed that police arrested the attackers
before they left the building, acting on a tip-off from victims’
families, who had been unable to reach the office by phone.
Ahmet Guvener, the pastor of a Protestant church in the nearby city of
Diyarbakir, who was a friend of the victims, said that he had spoken
to them on Tuesday night.
"They were at peace with the world. This news came as a total shock",
he said.
Zirve Publishing’s director, Hamza Ozant, who opened the Malatya
office last year, said that the murdered men had been "on the verge
of asking for police protection", following threats.
Malatya, the home town of Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II
in 1981, is known as a nationalist city. Nationalists had previously
protested outside the Zirve building following local news reports
accusing the staff of proselytism.
Introduced in 2005, Turkey’s new criminal code made it an offence to
prevent missionaries from working.
But widespread conspiracy theories continue to link missionaries to
international attempts to divide the country, and suspicion of them
is not just limited to Malatya or to nationalists.
The Islamist weekly Aksiyon claimed recently that 35,000 clandestine
Christian congregations were meeting in the country. In fact, Turkish
Protestant congregations number about 40.
In 2005 petrol bombs thrown at the International Protestant Church
in Ankara caused considerable damage.
Last year an American missionary in the southeastern city of Gaziantep
was bound and gagged by two assailants who claimed they were members
of al-Qaeda.
Although the attackers did not follow through on their threats to
kill the man, they promised to return and finish him off unless he
and his family left Turkey immediately.
Employees of Zirve Publishing in Malatya had been "forced by
circumstances to be quite bold, going round from bookshop to bookshop
offering their books for sale", said Jerry Maddix, an American
missionary who knew the murdered men well.
"They paid for their boldness with their life," he added.