Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Feb. 22, 2008
Records show Santoro killed while under police surveillance
Records that recently came to light as part of another murder case
have shown that an Italian priest shot dead by a teenager two years
ago in Turkey was in fact under police surveillance when the murder
occurred.
Father Andrea Santoro was killed on Feb. 5, 2006, in his church in
the northern Black Sea port city of Trabzon.
The piece of information that the priest was actually being monitored
by the police was recently revealed by records that went into the
file of Yasin Hayal, whose trial is pending as the prime inciter of
the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. Dink
was shot dead outside his office in January of 2007 by an
ultra-nationalist teenager, who is also from Trabzon.
According to police records in Hayal’s file, the Trabzon police
applied to a court in Erzurum for a warrant to monitor Santoro’s
phone conversations, on Nov. 8, 2006, three months before the murder
of Santoro.
The Trabzon police cited suspicions that Santoro might be carrying
out "separatist activities to revive the state of Pontus" —
established in the region along the eastern coast of the Black Sea
and an autonomous state until the 13th century — as the reason for
its request for a wiretapping order. However, the phone conversations
of Santoro were not the only ones the Trabzon police were interested
in. On the same day, the police requested permission from the court
to monitor the phone conversations of none other than Hayal and
another man named Hasan Deveci. The two were suspected of having
Salafi-Wahhabi leanings, according to the police request. The request
letter also said the police had reason to believe Hayal and Deveci
had contacts with other groups that have "radical ideas." Although
the two requests were made separately, on the day the court received
the requests a single warrant was issued authorizing the police to
monitor the calls of both Hayal and Santoro.
Starting Nov. 8, 2005, the police monitored each phone conversation
that Hayal and Santoro had every day for three months. The warrant
was due to expire on Feb. 8, 2006, three days after Santoro was
killed.
The investigation so far has not revealed whether there was a
particular reason for the police to request a phone monitoring
warrant from the court on the same day, such as a link between the
radical extremist circles that Hayal was involved in and the priest.
The 16-year-old who killed Santoro was initially sentenced to life,
which was then commuted to 20 years in prison due to the
perpetrator’s legal status as a minor.
It has not yet been established whether Hayal has any links with
Santoro’s killer.
However, Trabzon Police Chief Feridun Boz said they had uncovered no
connections between Hayal and the Santoro murder, in a statement he
made to the Doðan News Agency. Boz denied having any information on
how Hayal’s phone had come to be tapped.
22.02.2008
Today’s Zaman with wires Ýstanbul