ARRESTS IN TURKEY OVER PLOT TO KILL NOBEL LAUREATE PAMUK: REPORT

Agence France Presse
March 21 2008

ANKARA (AFP) – A Turkish nationalist party leader, a veteran journalist
and an academic have been arrested over an alleged plan to kill author
Orhan Pamuk, the country’s first Nobel laureate, media reported Friday.

Dogu Perincek, the leader of the Workers’ Party, senior journalist
Ilhan Selcuk and Kemal Alemdaroglu, the former rector of Istanbul
University, are in detention and are to appear before a public
prosecutor, the Anatolia news agency said.

The news agency did not specify any charges against them but said they
had been detained for their alleged role in an ultra-nationalist plot
to kill Pamuk and senior Kurdish figures.

Police also seized documents and software at a television station
partly owned by Perincek’s party, according to the IP news agency.

Thirteen other people, including a general and a retired colonel,
have been arrested over the supposed plot.

According to Turkish media reports, the suspects wanted to assassinate
Pamuk, pro-Islamist journalist Fehmi Koru and Kurdish political
figures Leyla Zana, Osman Baydemir and Ahmet Turk.

Despite his international fame, Pamuk’s vocal criticism of issues
that have long been national taboos has tagged him as renegade and a
traitor, including the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman
Empire, and the ongoing Kurdish conflict in the southeast.

The media reports said the plans were allegedly hatched by an
"ultra-nationalist" group thought to be linked to the security forces.