CONVERSATION LINKS ERGENEKON WITH US CONSULATE ATTACK
Today’s Zaman
Sept 18 2008
Turkey
Three police officers were shot dead in an armed attack eaerly in July
this year at the US Consulate General in Ä°stanbul’s Ä°stinye district.
One of the assailants in a deadly armed attack on the US Consulate
General in Ä°stanbul in July had engaged in phone conversations
with suspects arrested as part of the investigation into Ergenekon,
a neo-nationalist gang believed to be the extension of a clandestine
network of groups with members in the armed forces that planned to
overthrow the government.
Erkan Kargın, one of the assailants killed in the attack, had talked
to individuals currently in jail as Ergenekon suspects, the police
investigation into the US Consulate General attack showed. According
to transcripts of the phone conversations recorded last year with a
special warrant as part of the Ergenekon investigation, Kargın was
in close contact with a group within Ergenekon that was trying to
infiltrate the Ä°smailaga religious community, whose members reside
in the very conservative CarÅ~_amba area of Fatih in Istanbul. Most
of the phone conversations were about this mission of infiltrating
the community, police sources say.
Shortly after the US consulate attack, Kargın’s family, in their
testimony to the police, had stated that he had contact with mysterious
individuals.
Four gunmen stormed a guard post outside of the US Consulate General in
Ä°stanbul’s Ä°stinye neighborhood on the morning of July 9, starting a
deadly shootout. Three assailants, identified as Erkan Kargın, Bulent
Cınar and Raif Topcil, were killed in the assault. Three Turkish
police officers, Nedim Calık, Mehmet Onder Sacmalıoglu and Erdal
OztaÅ~_, were also slain. Computers, Internet communications and phone
conversations of the three terrorists were thoroughly examined by the
police in the ensuing investigation. Details of OztaÅ~_’s phone records
showed that the terrorist had contacts with a large number of people
who are part of the Ergenekon network, a fact that further supports
allegations that Ergenekon was behind the US consulate shootings.
What is Ergenekon?
The existence of Ergenekon, a behind-the-scenes network attempting
to use social and psychological engineering to shape the country
in accordance with its own ultranationalist ideology, has long been
suspected, but the current investigation into the group began only
in 2007, when a house in Ä°stanbul’s Umraniye district that was being
used as an arms depot was discovered by police.
The investigation was expanded to reveal elements of what in Turkey is
called the deep state, finally proving the existence of the network,
which is currently being accused of trying to incite chaos and disorder
in order to trigger a coup against the Justice and Development Party
(AK Party) government.
The indictment, which was made public in July, claims that the
Ergenekon network is behind a series of political assassinations
carried out over the past two decades. The victims include a secularist
journalist, Ugur Mumcu, long believed to have been assassinated by
Islamic extremists in 1993; the head of a business conglomerate,
Ozdemir Sabancı, who was shot dead by militants of the extreme-left
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) in his
high-security office in 1996; secularist academic Necip Hablemitoglu,
who was also believed to have been killed by Islamic extremists, in
2002; and a 2006 attack on the Council of State that left a senior
judge dead. Alparslan Arslan, found guilty of the Council of State
killing, said he attacked the court in protest of an anti-headscarf
ruling it had made. But the indictment contains evidence that he was
connected with Ergenekon and that his family received large sums of
money from unidentified sources after the shooting.
Eighty-six suspects, 47 of whom are currently under arrest, are accused
of having suspicious links to the gang. Suspects will start appearing
before the court on Oct. 20 and will face accusations that include
"membership in an armed terrorist group," "attempting to bring down
the government," "inciting people to rebel against the Republic of
Turkey" and other similar crimes.
The indictment also says Veli Kucuk, believed to be one of the leading
members of the network, had threatened Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian
journalist slain by a teenager in 2007, before his murder — a sign
that Ergenekon could be behind that murder as well.
–Boundary_(ID_pAkkaqllRINwajOFfWPQPw)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
