Agence France Presse
March 21, 2008 Friday

Turkish party leader, journalist arrested in nationalist gang probe

ANKARA

Turkish police on Friday detained 12 people, including a politician,
a prominent journalist and an academic, in a probe into a shadowy
network of suspected ultra-nationalists, Anatolia news agency said.

Those detained included: Dogu Perincek, leader of the once-Maoist,
now nationalist Workers’ Party; Ilhan Selcuk, chief editorialist and
leading light of the strictly secular, anti-government daily
Cumhuriyet; and Kemal Alemdaroglu, a former president of Istanbul
University.

Police seized documents and software at a television station partly
owned by Perincek’s party and also searched 83-year-old Selcuk’s
home, it said.

The three men are being questioned by police and will appear in the
coming days before a public prosecutor who will decide on whether to
release or formally charge them, the report said.

Anatolia did not say why they were detained, but said the arrests are
linked to an investigation into an ultra-nationalist group known as
Ergenekon, first heard of in June with the discovery of explosives in
an Istanbul house.

Thirty-nine people — retired soldiers, journalists, lawyers and
underworld figures — were formally charged in the investigation that
ensued.

Cumhuriyet issued a statement branding Selcuk’s arrest a bid by the
government to silence Turkey’s oldest major daily and distract
attention from a pending legal bid to ban the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP).

"We will not become a pawn in the ploy to link the Ergenekon
investigation to the case to close the AKP and to intimidate and
silence Cumhuriyet," Anatolia quoted editor-in-chief Ibrahim Yildiz
as saying.

The Cumhuriyet newspaper is one of the most vocal critics of the
Islamist-rooted AKP, which secularists accuse of seeking to undermine
the separation of state and religion in Turkey.

There has so far been no official statement on the probe into
Ergenekon, conducted behind under a secrecy law that restricts media
coverage.

Turkish newspapers, citing unnamed sources, say police are
investigating whether the suspects charged so far were involved in
acts of political violence aiming to discredit the government of
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This would include the murders of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink, the Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro and a senior judge
killed by a gunman who stormed into the country’s top administrative
court, they said.

Newspaper reports also claim that some of the accused planned to
assassinate 2006 Nobel literature laureat Orhan Pamuk, prominent
pro-government journalist Fehmi Koru and Kurdish politicians Leyla
Zana, Osman Baydemir and Ahmet Turk.

The media here has described the investigation as 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.