TURKISH POLITICIAN, EDITOR DETAINED IN GANG PROBE

Reuters
March 21 2008
UK

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The leader of a small Turkish nationalist party
and the editor of a left-leaning newspaper have been detained in
a probe into a shadowy ultra-nationalist gang, Turkish media said
on Friday.

Thirty-nine people have already been charged in the police
investigation into the far-right group, known as Ergenekon, over
allegations that it sought to engineer a coup against the country’s
Islamist-rooted government in 2009.

Turkish police told Reuters 12 people in total had been detained in
the latest swoop.

The CNN Turk Web site said among those detained were Dogu Perincek,
head of the nationalist, left-wing Workers’ Party, former rector of
Istanbul University Kemal Alemdaroglu and Ilhan Selcuk, editor of
the left-leaning and pro-establishment Cumhuriyet newspaper.

The Ergenekon gang was suspected of being behind a series of bombings
on the Cumhuriyet newspaper offices carried out last year, Turkish
media have said previously.

Newspapers have said the group had been plotting a series of bomb
attacks and assassinations and were behind the killing of Turkish
Armenian journalist Hrant Dink.

Analysts say the gang is part of a shadowy "deep state", code
for hardline nationalists in Turkey’s security forces and state
bureaucracy ready to take the law into their own hands for the sake
of their ideological agenda.