TURKISH NATIONALISTS PLOTTED TO KILL NOBEL WINNER
Khaleej Times
Jan 23 2008
United Arab Emirates
ISTANBUL – Police believe Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk and
Kurdish politicians were on the hit list of an ultranationalist group
whose alleged members were detained this week, newspapers reported
Wednesday.
Thirty-three people, including retired soldiers, journalists,
nationalist lawyers and underworld figures, are being interrogated
in Istanbul, prosecutors said in a statement.
They were detained Tuesday as part of a probe into the discovery of
hand grenades and bomb detonators in a house in Istanbul in June,
the statement said, without giving other details.
Police believe the suspects were planning to assassinate Pamuk, who
won the 2006 Nobel literature prize, prominent journalist Fehmi Koru
and Kurdish politicians Leyla Zana, Osman Baydemir and Ahmet Turk,
the daily Milliyet reported.
Police are also investigating whether the suspects were involved in
several politically motivated attacks that shocked Turkey over the
past two years, the daily Sabah said.
They include the murders of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink,
Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro and a senior judge killed by
a gunman who stormed into the country’s top administrative court,
the daily said.
Officials said the suspects include Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer
notorious for initiating legal action against Pamuk, Dink and other
intellectuals for disputing the official line on the World War I
Ottoman era massacres of Armenians.
Turkey fiercely rejects Armenian claims, backed by several Western
countries, that the killings were genocide.
Another prominent detainee is retired general Veli Kucuk, who has been
accused of organising extra-judicial killings of Kurds in the 1990s.
The suspects also include a retired colonel, a newspaper columnist,
the spokeswoman of the Turkish Orthodox Church and two prominent
underworld figures.
Sabah termed the detentions a blow against the ‘deep state’-a term
used here to describe members of the security forces acting outside
the law to preserve what they consider Turkey’s best interests,
often employing the services of the underworld.
Dink’s family claims that the journalist’s self-confessed teenage
assassin was incited by people who remain at large and enjoy the
protection of some members of the security forces.