BOMB FOUND BEFORE ANKARA RALLY TIED TO ERGENEKON

Today’s Zaman
Feb 13 2008
Turkey

A grenade discovered on Saturday by police teams ahead of a rally
in Ankara has been found to match those used by a neo-nationalist
"deep state" organization that was uncovered by a police operation
last month.

Police had located the explosive device in the capital city’s Sýhhiye
Square after receiving a bomb threat hours ahead of a secularist
rally to protest the abolishment of a ban on the headscarf at
universities. Police teams managed to successfully disarm the device.

The bomb was designed with a hand grenade as the explosive. The
hand grenade’s serial number matched those found in a police raid in
Ýstanbul last summer.

A police raid in June of last year had uncovered an arms depot in
a house in Ýstanbul’s Umraniye district. The discovery sparked an
investigation that culminated in the arrests of dozens of members
of the Ergenekon gang, a neo-nationalist group that is accused
of involvement in plans to stage a violent uprising against the
government. The prosecutor in the Ergenekon case has said the gang
worked to create disorder and chaos through divisive and violent
acts so the public would be willing to accept the intervention of
the military to restore order.

The group is also suspected of involvement in the murder of three
Christian missionaries in Malatya in 2007, the 2006 murder of a priest
in the northern city of Trabzon, the murder of Armenian journalist
Hrant Dink in 2007 and the 2006 attack on the Council of State and
a grenade attack on the Cumhuriyet newspaper in 2006. These are only
some of the accusations the prosecution has brought so far into the
investigation.

The serial number of the grenade found on Saturday also matches those
used in the Cumhuriyet newspaper attack.

Documents found in the suspects’ homes revealed that Ergenekon had
plotted to kill Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk and that it had
already hired two triggermen for the assassination. It even had plans
to assassinate neo-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, a member of
the gang publicly known for filing criminal complaints against writers
and intellectuals he found to be unpatriotic. Killing Kerincsiz would
have fit into their suspected goal of fomenting chaos in the country.

Numerous suspects were detained in the initial operations against the
Ergenekon gang, including Veli Kucuk, a retired general who is also the
alleged founder of an illicit intelligence unit in the gendarmerie,
the existence of which is denied by officials; Fikret Karadað, a
retired army colonel; Sevgi Erenerol, the press spokesperson for a
suspicious group called the Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate; and Sami
Hoþtan, a key figure in an investigation launched after a car accident
in 1996 near the small town of Susurluk that uncovered links between
a police chief, a convicted ultranationalist fugitive and a member
of Parliament. Ali Yasak, a well-known gangster linked to the figures
in the Susurluk incident, was also detained in the operation.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress